


The Song Remains the Same

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Relationship Discussions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-18 22:32:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 57,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9405785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: After a lab accident, Peggy wakes up in 1948, with no memories of anything since early 1946.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Last summer when I was soliciting prompts on Tumblr, I got this diabolically awesome one from Muccamukk: "Peggy/Jack/Daniel post series established. One of them gets amnesia so they forget everything that happened since the start of season one." I didn't mean for it to turn into an epic, but ... well ... it did, and at this point it's longer than anything I've written in the fandom so far -- and not done yet, but it is far enough along that I'm confident enough to start posting it as a WiP.
> 
> I wasn't going to start posting quite yet, but today is More Joy Day, and that seemed like a good excuse to put the first chapter out there!
> 
> Thanks to Sheron for alpha reading and cheerleading. <3

Her head hurt. That was the first thing she became aware of, a vicious headache like someone drilling into her temple just above her right ear.

Other discomforts gradually seeped into her awareness. She was very thirsty, and her entire body seemed to be weighed down by a dull, leaden ache. For a time, Peggy couldn't even muster the strength to open her eyes.

 _What happened to me?_

Had she been ill? The recent past was frustratingly vague; specific events slid away as she tried to get hold of them. The farther back she went, the clearer things got. She remembered starting her new job at the New York SSR office in vivid detail, and she remembered a thousand little slights that had been visited upon her since. What she couldn't remember was whether she'd been working on a case, or whether she'd fallen ill in the flat she shared with Colleen ...

Something seemed terribly wrong about that. A bolt of inexplicable adrenaline coursed through her, and she managed to peel her gummy eyes open.

She was someplace dim. Peggy squinted at blurred shadows on a white wall, turned gray in the dark. Her head was twisted to the side, and she gazed dully for a few moments at the wall, at the lumpen shadow looming against it -- cast by something behind her, but she couldn't turn her head to look yet. There was a window in the wall, with blinds that were mostly closed, but showed glimpses of city lights beyond.

New York, of course.

The wall was plain and unadorned. A rack held towels and a kidney-shaped basin. _Hospital,_ she thought. _I'm in hospital._

A soft rustle came from beside her, from the lamplight glow behind her shoulder. Someone was at her bedside, unseen unless she turned her head. She had no idea who might be sitting with her. Colleen? Or, worse thought ... had she been ill enough for her parents to come all the way from Britain? She hoped not; they didn't need that kind of worry, not after everything.

Her muscles felt like overstretched rubber. Carefully she turned her aching head to the side, squinting as the bedside lamp came into view. The light glinted off a head of blond hair, bowed over a newspaper, and for one instant of agonizing hope, she thought, _Steve!_

In that instant, she could almost believe the entire past year had been a mistake, a dream. Perhaps she'd been injured in the war, and she was even now waking up in hospital, with Steve beside her ...

But as quickly as it came, hope fled. She'd glimpsed the city lights through the blinds, glaring boldly into the night with no blackout to smother them. This wasn't London, or any other city she'd been to during the war. It was 1946, and Steve was gone, and ...

... and Jack Thompson, of all people, was sitting at her bedside.

All Peggy could do was stare in shock, almost forgetting her physical discomfort as it was washed away by total confusion. Why on God's green earth was _Thompson_ here? Some sort of work detail, it had to be, she thought. She _must_ have been injured on a case, and he'd been assigned to guard her -- an assignment which she imagined he must be handling with all his usual grace.

But, if he was on duty, there was no sign of a shoulder holster. He was, in fact, more rumpled than she'd ever seen him; his jacket was thrown over the arm of his chair, along with his tie, and his rumpled shirt looked like it had been slept in. She'd never seen him anything other than perfectly put together, the SSR's golden boy, not a hair out of place -- except when he was roughing up a suspect on Dooley's orders, she thought with distaste.

And now he was here at her bedside, looking a mess, and she couldn't understand.

 _Something really terrible happened,_ she thought in hazy bafflement. _The entire SSR has been wiped out, and we're the only two remaining agents ..._

And _that_ was a thought straight out of nightmare. It was enough to make her choke on a laugh at the sheer, awful absurdity, which turned into a dry, choking cough.

Thompson flinched and sat up, almost dropping the newspaper. "Peggy," he said in a desperate tone, and leaned forward. He was unshaven, his eyes shadowed with blue crescent moons under them, a visible legacy of sleepless nights. Even if she'd had to wake up to the sight of her least favorite co-worker (well, least favorite but for Krzeminski; it could have been worse), she couldn't help feeling some sympathy, because clearly something terrible had happened to him as well as to her.

"Water?" she managed. Every cough sent a white-hot bolt of pain through her head. If he was going to sit there staring at her as if he'd never seen a woman in a hospital bed before, he might as well do something useful.

"Water. Right. Coming." He jumped up as if galvanized, and even through her discomfort, Peggy was startled by the speed and alacrity of the response. Who knew ... all she had to do to get Jack Thompson to obey her orders was get ... shot, or stabbed, or whatever had happened to her. Despite her inability to remember what had caused her to end up here, she was increasingly sure it must have happened on duty somehow. Not that she could imagine how she'd been exposed to enough danger to land her in hospital, given the lack of field assignments she'd been dealing with since the war. _Some sort of filing accident ... a tower of storage boxes crashed on my head ..._

Agent Thompson brought her a glass of water. When he put it in her hand, his fingers curled around hers, supporting them on the glass. He'd never been inappropriate in that particular way before, but if he thought he could take liberties just because she was in a hospital bed, she had no qualms about setting him straight. She freed her hand with a firm jerk and pushed herself upright in the bed, viciously refusing to acknowledge the escalation of her headache. Thompson moved forward as if he had some intention of trying to help her, but Peggy glared at him fiercely enough to quash _that_ fancy. He subsided back into his chair with his hands still half upraised, as if he didn't know what to do with them.

"Peggy," he said in a soft, wondering tone, and grinned suddenly. "Either you're feeling awful or you're mad at me, or both. And I don't care -- you can yell at me from now 'til next month if you like. Just ... you know you've been out for three days? They were talking about possible brain damage ..."

Having gulped down most of the glass of water, Peggy lowered it and gave him a sharp look. "I don't know what you think you're about, Agent Thompson, but the least you could do is tell me what _happened."_

"Right," he said, leaning back in his chair until the front legs came off the floor, tilting the whole thing against the wall. "I don't know how much you remember, but it was a lab accident --" He stopped, and leaned forward abruptly, the legs of the chair coming down with a thump. His tired gaze had gone razor-sharp, fixed on her, and if she didn't know better, she'd say he looked scared. "Wait, what did you just call me?"

"I called you by your _name,_ Agent. What sort of lab accident?" She would very happily throw the remaining contents of the water glass in his face if he didn't give her some proper answers.

But he was still staring at her. "I'm getting the doctor," he said.

Peggy rubbed her forehead. She was much too tired and ill to deal with Thompson being his usual frustrating self ... even if a part of her was clamoring that he was behaving very differently from usual, in a very worrisome way. "Yes, fine, get the doctor if you insist. And I'd like very much to speak to the Chief, if he's still about the office." It was night, but Dooley was always the last of the day shift to leave, and _he_ at least she trusted to give her straight answers.

Thompson had risen to his feet; now he stopped and looked down at her. She couldn't deny it any longer; he looked blatantly worried. "Which Chief?" he asked, and there was an almost hesitant note in his voice, an uncertain quality, nothing at all like the smarmily confident tones she was so accustomed to. "Sousa? If it's Daniel you want, he's been up for two days straight; I made him go home --"

"Chief _Dooley,_ for heaven's sake," Peggy snapped. She was beyond playing nice with him.

As usual, her outburst didn't seem to have the desired impact; the times when Thompson managed to goad her into an outright explosion usually just made him laugh as if her anger was a great joke. But this time he didn't break into a grin or wink at her, as if a joke had gone according to plan. He just stared. "Peggy," he said slowly, "what's today's date?"

That just made her angrier, but mostly at herself, because she couldn't remember exactly. February? she thought. March? She made a wild grab for the one that seemed the most plausible. "It's February," she said.

His breath caught a little. "What year?"

"1946, of course." That, at least, she was sure of. He was still standing as if frozen, so she struggled into a sitting position, swinging her legs out of bed with a grunt of effort. "Fine, if you can't be bothered, I'll do it myself."

"Peggy -- no --" Thompson caught her by the shoulders. She would register, later, how gentle and careful his hands had been. Right now, though, all she could feel was fury, borne of a combination of her own helplessness and confusion and frustration with the fact that one of the few constants in her life -- Thompson being a wanker -- seemed to be failing to go as expected at the one time when she wanted _something_ to be familiar.

"Stop _touching_ me!" she snapped.

He jerked away with a look of shock and hurt so raw that for an instant, and for reasons she couldn't understand, it tore her soul. But he covered it up quickly as he straightened up; she could almost see him drawing the tattered shreds of his dignity around himself. "You don't know me ..." he began slowly, speaking almost to himself.

"I do know you, more's the pity. You're Agent Jack Thompson of the SSR. I don't know why they assigned you to guard me, I can only assume there's a limited supply of available agents at the moment, but if you don't know what's going on, I would very much like to speak with someone who does."

"Yes ..." he said slowly. "Yes. Of course. I'm going to get a doctor, okay?" He held out his hand, in what seemed to be an involuntary move to touch her, but stopped in mid-motion and turned it into a palm-up gesture urging her to stop. "Look, just stay in bed, and I'll bring a doctor. You're gonna be okay." Again there was a heart-rending flash of hurt in his eyes, and she didn't know why it touched her so deeply. He was still speaking, all in a rush, as if he had to get the words out. "Peggy, it's 1948, not 1946. But you're gonna be okay. We'll fix this."

After he left -- turning his back on her with a sharp motion, as if he didn't want to look at her anymore -- Peggy stayed as she was, then swung her legs back up onto the bed.

She wasn't entirely sure she could have walked as far as the door anyway. She still felt weak and shaky, and the water was sitting uncomfortably in her cramping stomach.

But his words disturbed her far more than her physical condition. Alone, where no one could see her moment of weakness (least of all Jack Thompson), she wrapped her arms around her shoulders and shivered.

Two years. She couldn't possibly have lost two years of her life, could she?

 

***

 

"She doesn't remember anything from the last two years."

Jack's words were ripped out on the point of a knife blade, and all Daniel could do was look at him across the room. If there weren't other people present, he could have done _something_ \-- reached out and touched him ... something. As it was, all he could do was watch Jack barricading himself behind a bulwark of anger and forced calm.

They'd commandeered a conference room in the hospital's administrative wing, which was now half full of scientists and medical personnel, as well as two exhausted agents. Daniel hadn't seen Peggy yet. She was with doctors right now, and was apparently alert and responsive. Which should have been good news. No, it _was_ good news. It just wasn't quite the news they'd hoped for.

When Jack had called to tell him that Peggy was awake, dragging him out of a sleep so deep he still felt hazy and drugged, his first reaction had been overwhelming relief. Then he'd registered how Jack's voice sounded -- distant and brittle, the way Jack got when he was coping with emotions he didn't know how to express.

"She thinks it's early 1946," Jack had said, on the phone, and as the words sank in, Daniel was already scrambling for his clothes in the dark bedroom. He didn't know what he was going to do, just that right now, Jack and Peggy both needed him _there._

"I'll be right there," he said, groping around in the dark. His hand slapped something cold and hard, and he only realized what it was as it was already starting to fall. With a curse, he dropped the phone and made a double-handed grab that swished through empty air, before there was a tremendous shattering crash. 

Daniel rubbed his hand over his face, and felt around on the bed until he found the receiver and picked it up again. "Still there?"

"What the hell was that all about?" Jack asked. Despite the weary hurt in his voice -- that he probably thought he was hiding, the idiot -- there was now a note of suppressed laughter.

"I knocked over Peggy's lamp," Daniel sighed. He finally groped his way to the one on the other nightstand, the practical brass one that Jack was responsible for, and snapped it on. It was just as he'd feared; the china lamp with the roses, that Peggy had paid far too much for in a downtown L.A. department store, was in pieces all over the bedroom floor.

"You broke Peggy's lamp?" Jack still sounded amused, but also vaguely horrified.

"Yes, dammit, I broke Peggy's lamp. And if you laugh at me, so help me, Thompson, you're helping me find another one."

"No, I'll just stand back while she mops the floor with you." There was an awkward silence, while Daniel one-handedly worked his leg into the prosthesis, and then Jack said, "She didn't remember me, Daniel. She didn't know me at all, except from -- then."

"Don't," Daniel said quietly. His hand stilled on the prosthesis's straps, frozen by the bleak misery in Jack's voice. "The brightest minds at the SSR are working on this, okay? She's gonna be fine. Whatever's wrong with her right now, they'll fix her."

"I love your blind faith in the scientific establishment," Jack said with a faint ghost of his usual sarcasm.

"No you don't, but you love me." He wasn't sure what made him say it. They didn't go for those kinds of gestures, he and Jack. He and Peggy were freer with those sorts of verbal confessions. Peggy and Jack ... he didn't know how they might be with each other, when Daniel wasn't around. But it wasn't how things were with him and Jack, not usually.

And, on the other end of the line, there was only silence. Jack _couldn't_ say it, Daniel sometimes thought, as if some kind of damage from long ago had sunk deep in his bones and stilled his throat if he ever tried. As if telling people he loved them, or admitting it to himself, would rip him open and leave him to bleed out.

Into the silence, Daniel said, "I'll be there as soon as I can, okay?"

"Take a cab," Jack said, rallying a bit. "You've had, what, four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight? I don't want to be responsible for you running off the road."

"You're not my boss, you know." It was playful, an old joke between them.

Jack's answering laugh was a small, sad thing, but it was there.

Now, in the conference room, Daniel kept thinking about that stupid lamp, in pieces all over the floor. Right now it felt like a metaphor for the rest of his life. Everything about this thing the three of them had shared for the last year had felt as if they were walking a tightrope above disaster. A number of people at the SSR knew about his relationship with Peggy, but no one, to the best of Daniel's knowledge, knew that Jack was part of it (though he had a suspicion the Jarvises might have guessed, and possibly Rose). And as if that wasn't enough, there was the opposite-coast thing to navigate, as well as the volatile combination of their personalities.

Daniel had always feared that they weren't meant to last, that they _couldn't_ last. But he'd thought they'd bring each other down somehow. If it was going to blow up, he never would have guessed that something so ridiculous and unlikely as an accident with one of the SSR's lab toys would have done it.

But that was just how their lives went, wasn't it?

"I am going to assume," Daniel said, looking down the conference table at the scientific contingent, who were conferring among themselves and scribbling busily on pads of paper, napkins, or whatever else was handy, "that if anyone has managed to figure out _anything_ new about the doohickey she apparently turned on, and how to undo it, someone would have said something already."

Samberly was the one who looked up, because of course he was. "We're almost there, Chief. I think we're close to a breakthrough."

They'd been saying that for three days. 

"Maybe something to do with the button on the side --" one of the others put in ... Dr. Wescott, Daniel recalled, the one who'd found Peggy unconscious in the lab in the first place.

"That's not a button," said another. "It's clearly an attachment for a part of the device that was never recovered from the HYDRA facility where it was found."

"If you have a _better_ idea --"

"Keep me informed," Daniel interrupted wearily. "Us," he amended with a glance at Jack. "Keep _us_ informed. Meanwhile, is there any reason she can't have visitors?"

Jack pushed back his chair and stood up.

"Hey, where are you going?" Daniel demanded, struggling to his feet.

"Taking a walk," Jack said over his shoulder, and marched out.

Great. Not that he didn't understand why Jack was acting so squirrelly about it, but it didn't make things any easier if he apparently didn't have Jack to rely on either. Daniel thought about going after him, then decided that Jack would keep; Peggy was a bigger priority at the moment.

"So, to answer my question --" he prompted, this time in the direction of the neurologists.

He was given a bunch of admonitions about keeping her calm and quiet (ha, Daniel thought, as if; this was _Peggy_ after all), and conflicting advice from the two main neurologists on her case, one of whom wanted him to avoid all mention of recent events for fear of confusing her, in contrast to the other's advice to tell her as much as possible to jog her memories. Daniel left them arguing about it and went down the hallway he'd grown very familiar with, to knock at the door of Peggy's room.

"It's Daniel," he called softly. "Daniel Sousa. Can I come in?"

A muffled voice called from inside, "Yes, come in, please."

He did, steeling himself for whatever he might find. But it wasn't terrible -- very far from it, in fact. Peggy was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed in the clothes she'd been wearing when she was zapped in the lab. Daniel realized a little guiltily that neither he nor Jack had thought to bring in something fresh for her to wear when she recovered. She looked fine, aside from being slightly pale, with her hair more mussed than normal -- _another thing we didn't bring her was a hairbrush,_ Daniel thought with another guilty twinge. She was looking thoughtfully at a newspaper, and glanced up from it when Daniel came in.

Her smile was warm and welcoming and very Peggy, and Daniel dared to hope that Jack had been wrong. Maybe Peggy just woke up confused, and Jack had jumped to the worst possible conclusion. Or maybe she had suffered some slight amnesia at first, but her memory had come back once she had time to recover.

"Daniel," she said, and that was when he knew Jack _wasn't_ wrong. The difference was slight, but it was there -- an extra level of formality and distance that took him straight back to the early days of their friendship, when they'd been cautiously navigating their new acquaintance.

With that in mind, he tried not to make the same mistakes Jack probably had, and struggled to remain polite and respectful -- a man dealing with a female co-worker who didn't know him very well yet. "Okay if I sit down?" he asked, nodding to the chair where he and Jack had been trading off Peggy-watching duty. She gave him another of those heart-melting smiles and nodded.

"They say I can go home soon," she said. "They're just waiting for the results of a few more tests. Of course, I'm not entirely sure just now where 'home' is. Would it be too much of an imposition to ask you to take me there?"

Unable to trust his voice, Daniel could only nod.

"I know this must be strange for you," Peggy said, cautiously friendly. "I'm trying to wrap my head around the fact that it's apparently 1948. I'm happy to see you're still with the SSR. We're friends, aren't we?"

 _Oh God,_ Daniel thought with heart-stopping horror. _They haven't told her ANYTHING yet._ "Yes, we are," he said. "I'm actually in charge of the West Coast division of the SSR. I don't know if they told you?"

"Oh, Daniel, that's wonderful!" She beamed at him, and he had to fight the urge to do all of the things he wanted to do -- to hug her, to hold her hands, to cling to her and bury his face in his hair and reassure himself that she was all right.

But in a way, this was nothing he hadn't dealt with before. He'd spent over a year struggling with what he believed was a hopeless crush, guarding his every move towards her so he didn't accidentally cross a line to be rude or inappropriate. It was hard, very hard, to stuff himself back into that mindset, but he told himself firmly that it was only temporary. The lab boys were going to figure this out, and they'd get their familiar 1948 Peggy back. In the meantime, what _this_ Peggy needed, more than anything else, was a friend.

Besides, when she did get her memories back, she'd probably also remember all of this, and Daniel didn't want to leave her with any lingering uncertainty that both he and Jack respected her thoroughly, and would respect her just the same if they weren't in a relationship with her. And he was, by God, going to make sure that Jack left her with the same impression, even if Daniel had to make sure that Jack had no unsupervised contact with her until they got her back to normal.

And now he'd let the conversation lapse, and her polite smile had begun to falter. He had to run his mind back to what they'd been talking about: oh right, his promotion. "Gotta admit I'm pretty happy about it," he said, forcing a smile. "Though, to be honest, it's not quite the promotion I was hoping for when I got it. The whole SSR is in a really uncertain place right now. They're rearranging a lot of things, and we might be moving to another agency -- and that's not at all what I should be talking to you about right now, is it?" he finished, flustered.

But her smile had become something warmer, less of the polite "Peggy smiling at an acquaintance" look, and something a little closer to how she looked at him these days, what Jack had once called her "Daniel, you're being an adorable goof" expression. "No, that's exactly what I want! Everyone is walking on eggshells around me. I feel as if there are a hundred unpleasant things that are being kept from me. But I'm not going to break." There was a desperate yearning in her face. "Daniel, I need to _know."_

That would probably be the hardest thing for Peggy to deal with, he thought. She hated feeling left out of anything, and now she'd been left out of two years of her own life. "I don't know where to begin," he admitted. "Two years, Peg -- it's so much."

"At least tell me if there's anything awful," she said. "You're all right, I can see that. The Communists haven't taken over, have they?"

"No," he said, smiling in a more genuine way. Though he wasn't even sure where to begin telling her about Dottie Underwood. "No, your life is pretty good right now, Peg. You get to do fieldwork just the same as the other agents, and you're happier than I've ever seen you."

"We still work together, then?" she asked hopefully, and Daniel was struck by that little flash of expectant hope. She might not be over Steve yet -- he forced himself to remember that she'd been carrying a pretty big torch for Captain America back in 1946 -- but he was amazed how he'd never noticed those little glimmers of reciprocated interest back then. _Too busy feeling sorry for yourself, Sousa,_ he told himself.

"Or, no, wait," she corrected herself. "If you're in charge now -- are we at the same agency? Or do I still work in New York?"

Daniel mentally cursed everyone who'd failed to brief her, leaving him floundering in a vast sea of information she didn't have. He didn't want to dump too much on her too fast, but he didn't want her to feel like he was lying to her, either. "We're in Los Angeles, both of us. Officially, you're the New York liaison to the West Coast office. Which is a long-winded way of saying," he added, "that Jack wasn't willing to let my office get credit for your wins. Because that's the kind of jerk he is." 

And then he winced so hard that he thought some of it probably showed on his face. Peggy in 1948 would've understood exactly what he meant by all of that; she would have heard it as affectionate joking, which it was. But he had a feeling that 1946 Peggy was going to take every word at face value.

And sure enough, she was frowning. "What does Agent Thompson have to do with it?"

"It's Chief Thompson now. He's your boss, Peggy. Technically." Though he had no idea how to explain to Peggy the actual relationship that she and Jack had. Even mentioning the fact that they were all three in _that_ kind of relationship wouldn't have explained it adequately, let alone adding the detail that Peggy had been taking a leading role in their current string-pulling to roll the dwindling SSR into a new agency, and Daniel had a strong suspicion that she might end up being the boss of both of them if she managed to get her SHIELD project off the ground.

Assuming her current amnesia didn't derail it. There were a lot of delicate negotiations in progress, and while they could afford to lose a few days, Daniel didn't want to think about what might happen if they had to start over again at square one. Peggy had a bad habit of not writing things down, and he was very much afraid that most of the current political situation regarding SHIELD existed only in her head.

Meanwhile, Peggy was staring at him like he'd just told her she had grown an extra set of nostrils during her missing two years. "Please tell me you're joking."

"In fairness," Daniel said, "that was just about the look on your face the first time you had to take orders from him, too."

"Jack Thompson," Peggy murmured. "Well ... I suppose that would explain why he was waiting for me to wake up. Though I wouldn't have thought ..." She shook her head, shaking off whatever she was thinking. "And Chief Dooley? What of him?"

"He's dead, I'm afraid," Daniel said gently. Might as well get it out of the way, to save hitting her with it later. 

"Oh," she said, in blank surprise. "I ... what happened? No," she interrupted herself. "You can tell me later. I suppose that's why Thompson is in charge. It's reasonable that some of the people I knew then are dead now."

The war had done a real number on all of them, Daniel thought.

"What of my roommate Colleen?" Peggy asked, looking hopeful. "Do you know what she's doing these days?"

She'd had a roommate? Daniel shook his head, embarrassed to realize how little he'd known of her life back then. "I'm sorry, I don't. I've never heard that name. You were living with a friend named Angie for awhile -- you're still friends, actually, though she's back in New York."

"Angie," Peggy said thoughtfully. "Well, it's good to know I have more friends, even if I don't remember them. I think I know a waitress by that name ..." She looked down at her hands. "And I don't seem to have a ring, so I see I haven't been so careless as to get myself engaged or married in the last two years. That's one less awkward situation to worry about."

"Er ..." Daniel said, awkwardly.

"Oh. I have a boyfriend, do I? Well, it was inevitable, I suppose." She sounded like a woman remarking on the depressing unavoidability of bad weather. "I can't say I think much of him if he hasn't even been to see me. Unless perhaps the SSR is keeping him away -- is he a civilian? Rude of them."

"No ... it's ..."

"You're dating Sousa," said Jack's voice sharply from the door. "He's just too much of a gentleman to actually come out and say it."

Jack was leaning in the doorway in a lazy slouch, hat held carelessly in one hand, wrapped in a shell of brittle, angry defiance. Daniel wondered if Jack realized how transparent he was, and then the surprising thought hit him that Jack actually might _not_ be that transparent to most people. Maybe people casually observing him would only see the air of lazy nonchalance he was projecting.

Peggy was too busy giving Daniel a shocked look, anyway. "Daniel, I'm _so_ sorry!"

"No, please don't -- it's not your fault. I was working up to telling you." He shot an irritable glare at Jack over his shoulder. "In my own time. There's actually quite a lot more to it, Peggy, so I didn't want to drop a bombshell like that without explaining, except _some_ people wouldn't leave well enough alone ..."

"I got tired of listening to you stammer at her," Jack said carelessly, twirling his hat in his hands. "Had to listen to enough of that back in the real 1946."

Daniel wasn't expecting Peggy to puff up like an angry mother hen on his behalf, though perhaps he should have. "That's quite enough, Agent Thompson. I see two years hasn't improved you at all."

Jack's smile was bitter. "Times change, but people don't, right, Peggy?"

"Apparently not!"

"Whoa, whoa, Peggy, Peggy." Without thinking about it, Daniel reached out and caught her hand -- then stopped, realizing what he'd done, but there was no way to let go without making things even more awkward. Instead he just bulled on through, trying not to think about how nice her hand felt in his, or how she'd stilled instantly when he'd taken hold of her. "There's a whole lot more that you need to know --"

But then he had to stop, realizing that he couldn't tell her the whole truth, not here, with anyone who passed in the corridor a potential witness, especially when he had no idea how she was going to react. They'd all three accepted the reality that the exposure of their relationship would cause the implosion of all of their careers. Maybe it wouldn't be true someday; maybe eventually they could stop hiding, when they were better established and not in their current precarious position.

For himself, Daniel didn't care all that much. Losing his job would sting, but he'd find a way to deal. Peggy and Jack both cared a lot about their careers, though, and Daniel wasn't going to cost them that, not if he could help it.

He shot Jack a vicious glare, only to get the same bitter smile back. Jack _knew_ they couldn't discuss the full extent of their relationship here, while Peggy and Daniel's side of it was, if not exactly open knowledge, then certainly an open secret in the SSR. Someone was bound to mention it to her eventually.

"Don't let him get under your skin, Daniel," Peggy said. She released his hand in a vaguely apologetic kind of way.

"You have no idea," Daniel muttered. "Look ... Peggy ... you said you're going to be released from the hospital soon, right? How about I go round up a doctor and see if I can grease the wheels a little? I think we need to get out of here and go somewhere we can have a good long conversation in private."

" _We_ will talk to the doctors," Peggy said firmly. "Because you're right, there's no point in languishing around the hospital like a plague victim when I feel perfectly fine." 

She pushed herself off the bed, catching herself subtly on the bedrail when her knees wobbled a bit. Daniel had to take himself firmly in hand to keep from trying to steady her, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jack start to make a move forward, and then stop himself.

"You're sure you feel good to leave?" Daniel asked in renewed worry. He'd almost forgotten while he was talking to her that she'd had her brain thoroughly zapped and spent three days in a coma. The amnesia might not be the only side effect.

"Please, Daniel, I don't need to be hovered over."

Jack looked like he might be thinking about blocking her path, but stepped out of her way before she had a chance to glare at him. Daniel tried to follow without hovering overtly. Jack, he noticed, was doing the same thing a few steps back.

Peggy's energy seemed to have rebounded fully by the time they located the neurologists, and as Daniel had suspected, the doctors were no match for the full force of Hurricane Peggy. She secured her own release in a fraction of the time it would probably have taken Daniel.

When they left the hospital, it startled him to discover that the sun was up. The night had passed and it was another brilliant, cloudless Los Angeles morning, making Daniel feel withered and wilted after the recent series of exhausting days and nights. Peggy, he noticed, was squinting in the bright sunlight as if her head hurt.

"Jack'll need to drive us," Daniel said, looking around to make sure Jack was still discreetly not-quite-hovering nearby -- which he was. "My car's at home."

"We could take a cab," Peggy suggested.

"No, it really needs to be Jack." God, he just wanted ... well, he just wanted not to have to deal with this, but at the very least he needed to be somewhere private that he could explain to her before she _really_ put her foot in it with the world's best intentions. "Jack, are you going to get your car, or do we just stand here wincing at the sun until we all fall asleep on the sidewalk?"

Jack shoved his hands into his pockets. "Actually, I was thinking about going into the office --"

"Quit being a martyr and get the damned car, man," Daniel snapped, suddenly feeling thoroughly fed up with both of them.

Jack opened his mouth, shut it, gave Daniel a wry look, and went to get the car.

It really wasn't fair to be angry with either of them, Daniel thought. It wasn't Peggy's fault at all, and even though Jack seemed to be determined to confirm all her worst opinions of him, it was just Jack being Jack -- when he felt threatened, he doubled down on his worst asshole tendencies. Daniel was well aware of it, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with.

Peggy touched his arm. "There's more going on between the two of you than you're talking about," she said quietly. "Daniel, what did he _do?"_

"It wasn't ... He didn't ... Look, I'm not kidding that we need to talk," Daniel said. "And I'll talk about it in the car, but not here."

She merely gave him a brisk nod, which was a relief. She might've had two years of her memories wiped away (not permanently, please God not permanently) but she was still Peggy, and right now her Peggyness was as much of a relief as it was a frustration.

Jack pulled up to the sidewalk in the borrowed SSR car he was driving during his current jaunt to the West Coast, and tapped the horn. Daniel held the passenger-side front door open for Peggy. She gave him an arch look and slid into the back instead. Daniel took the backseat as well, so he could talk to her without having to twist around.

Jack said nothing about it, merely slipped a pair of sunglasses over his eyes and pulled out onto the boulevard. _Fine,_ Daniel thought, _give me no help at all here._

"I feel very strange asking this, but where do I live?" Peggy asked. "We aren't married, are we, Daniel?"

"No," Daniel said, with a quick glance up to the front that caught Jack watching them from behind his sunglasses in the rearview mirror. Realizing he'd been caught, Jack turned his face forward again. "No ... but ... we do live in the same house. Just so you aren't surprised."

"Well," Peggy said. She laughed. "I suppose I shouldn't be shocked to learn that I'm not exactly living according to the rules of proper social convention. It's just a bit of a surprise to hear it. My mother must be scandalized. I'm sure she considers me quite the fallen woman."

"I don't think she knows. It's kind of a secret," Daniel said. He felt his cheeks getting hot. All of this had happened by accident, one piece at a time, and trying to explain it now was mortally embarrassing. "You're officially living with -- uh, with friends, in a guest bedroom in a friend's house. People know we're dating, but they don't know you're staying over at my house. And they don't know ... uh ..."

Aargh. She was _so_ not going to react well to this. But the longer he waited to tell her, the worse it would get.

Jack's sunglasses-shielded gaze had returned to rest on them in the rearview mirror. Daniel hoped he was at the very least checking the road every once in a while.

"It's not just me," he said, getting the words out in a rush. "Jack's living with us too."

"What? For the love of God, _why?"_

Daniel cringed. He thought now that he should have waited until they were at the house -- or taken her off privately for a quiet word at the hospital -- _anything,_ really, just so he could do it without Jack having to listen to her initial reaction. He tried to remind himself how she'd thought about Jack in the old days -- how they'd both thought about Jack. It was completely understandable. He'd have done the same if someone had walked into his life in 1946 and told him he was going to be sleeping with the jerk two years later. But that didn't make it any easier to know that Jack was listening to every word.

And he wasn't saying anything, which, with Jack, was usually a bad sign; it was when the sarcasm _stopped_ that you really had to look out.

"Peggy, you don't understand," he said as gently as possible. "He's not merely living in our house. He's -- it's just not you and me, Peggy, it's you and me and _Jack,_ do you see?"

"No," Peggy said, staring at him, though he could see by the mounting horror in her expression that she understood very well indeed.

"Yes, and it would make perfect sense to you if you could remember the last two years. Peggy -- no --" Her mouth had opened, and Daniel put his hand out quickly to cover it. "Peggy, you should stop talking now. You're going to say some things you'll really regret later."

Peggy yanked his hand down, paying as little heed to his attempts to stop her as he'd been afraid of. "I'm _dating_ him? _You're_ \--" She stared at him for a long moment, during which Daniel wished he could think of something clever to say, and wished just as hard that he were a thousand miles away from the backseat of this car. "This is a joke," she declared at last. "This is a very terrible joke, and I want you to _stop,_ Agent Sousa."

Her voice caught on the last word, and he saw in that instant how close to the edge she must be. She'd had her whole world wiped away from her. If Daniel felt like he'd lost "his" Peggy, then Peggy must be feeling like she'd lost herself; she was cast adrift in a strange time, surrounded by people who were strangers to her -- even the ones she knew from 1946 had changed so much that they must feel irrevocably unfamiliar.

"I don't think dating is quite the right word for it," Jack spoke up suddenly from the front seat. "Considering how it's a secret relationship and all. We're having sex, Marge. Loads of sex."

"Jack," Daniel said, "shut up, you're not helping."

"I feel ill," Peggy said weakly.

"Oh, come on, it wasn't that bad." Jack was on a roll now. "Actually it was really great. You're a real tiger between the sheets --"

"No, really." Peggy swallowed. "I think I'm going to be ill. Pull over, please."

"Oh," Jack said, startled, and he veered onto the sidewalk, scattering a frantic flurry of pedestrians.

Daniel leaned over her to push the door open and helped her lean over as she retched helplessly.

"We're taking her back to the hospital, right?" Jack said, twisting around and throwing his arm over the back of his seat. His nonchalant attitude had evaporated, and he looked frantic. "She's still breathing okay, right?"

"It's my head," Peggy gasped, pressing her hands to her forehead while Daniel hung onto her shoulders. "It's just my head -- Daniel, are we close to your house?"

 _Your_ , not _our,_ but he could let it go. "We're almost there, actually. Just a couple more turns."

"I'd rather go there, then," she panted. "I'll be fine. I just need to lie down for a few minutes, and not to be in a moving vehicle for awhile."

"You sure you don't want me to drive her back to the hospital," Jack said anxiously.

Peggy straightened up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I _said_ I don't want to go back to the hospital. Kindly do me the favor of not talking over the top of me, _Agent."_

"Fine, the house it is," Jack muttered.

Daniel handed Peggy his handkerchief to clean up with. She spent the rest of the drive leaning back in the seat with her eyes closed and lips pressed together in a firm line, clearly determined to avoid any repeat of the earlier incident.

It was a vast relief to turn onto the tree-shaded street that had begun, over the last year and a half, to feel like home. Jack parked on the street behind Daniel's little green car. While Peggy's presence at Daniel's house was a secret, at least to the extent they could keep it that way, they'd never made any effort to hide that Jack was staying there. He was quite openly staying in Daniel's spare bedroom whenever he visited from the East Coast, as he often did for transparently flimsy work reasons. It only made sense, one Chief of the SSR offering hospitality to another. It was always possible that if Daniel was a bachelor, some busybody might have put two and two together enough to get a rumor started ... but he wasn't; most people at the SSR knew he was dating Peggy, and the _other_ option was so far-fetched that no one had even thought of it.

"We're here," Daniel said quietly, nudging Peggy.

Her eyes snapped open. She got out of the car on her own, then sagged, swaying and catching herself on the car's roof. Jack moved in quickly from the side, putting an arm around her before Daniel could do anything. As he got the crutch under him, Daniel couldn't help noticing how she leaned into Jack, letting him help her up the steps to the front door with wordless trust.

He'd suspected before, but now he knew for sure: on some level, she _did_ remember them. Everything hadn't been completely wiped away, not even for her. There was no way she'd have let Jack do that for her back in 1946.

It was just a matter of finding a way to bring it out. Reminding her what she'd forgotten.

Jack had to unwind himself from Peggy to open the door and let them into the house, and she was already inside under her own power before he could try taking hold of her again. Peggy half-sat, half-collapsed onto the couch, and Jack went into the kitchen and poured her a glass of water.

She gave him an odd look when he handed it to her, but only said, in a voice that was quiet and a little puzzled, "Thank you."

"You want something for your head, Peg?" Daniel asked. "Aspirin? Or did the docs give you anything stronger?"

"Aspirin would be appreciated," she said, tipping her head against the back of the couch and closing her eyes.

"Still think she ought to be in the hospital," Jack muttered. He was leaning against the wall nearest to Peggy, arms crossed and body language closed off.

"They didn't find a single thing wrong with me," Peggy said without opening her eyes. "There's nothing the matter that a good sleep in my own bed won't cure."

Daniel came back from the bathroom with a bottle of aspirin. "Uh, actually ... do you think you'd be more comfortable in the guest bedroom? The downstairs bedroom is the one where we sleep, but there's a guest bedroom upstairs. It's the one that Jack supposedly uses when he's here, but we don't actually use it. I can go make it up with clean sheets."

"Thank you, Daniel," Peggy said. Her voice sounded wan. "That would be very kind."

"It's up to you, of course," Daniel said anxiously. He was pretty sure he'd made her wilt a little more, reminding her of how much of her life was strange to her now.

"The guest bedroom will be just fine," she said, and offered him a pallid smile before swallowing two aspirin.

She came upstairs with him, and sat on a chair in the bedroom while Daniel made up the bed. "I imagine there's something here for me to sleep in?" she asked. "Pajamas, something of that nature."

"Yes. Of course. I'll bring up some of your night things."

Her smile was polite and slightly distracted, and it wrenched his heart to have her look at him that way, as if he was a stranger who was merely being kind to her out of obligation. "Thank you," she said as he left.

Maybe Jack was right, Daniel thought as he went downstairs. Maybe she ought to be in the hospital. But maybe she really would heal up faster at home, surrounded by familiar things. He just didn't know. He was so far out of his depth right now that it seemed there was just no bottom to it.

There was no sign of Jack, and Daniel thought he might have gone for a walk to clear his head, until entering the bedroom to find him sitting on their double-wide bed, staring at nothing. 

"Thanks for the help, by the way," Daniel said.

Jack shrugged. "She doesn't want me around."

"So whose fault is that?" Daniel demanded. He was sick of having to manage the situation by himself because Jack had decided to be so very _Jack_ about it. "What's the matter with you, anyway?"

"What do you mean?" Jack retorted, folding his arms defensively across his chest.

"You. You and her. Come on, Jack, I know you're smarter than this. What are you trying to do, make sure to confirm all her worst opinions about you?"

He could see Jack trying to hold up the defensive barricade of not caring, only to watch it crumble. 

"You don't know what it's like," Jack said, looking away. "The way she looks at me -- At least she still _likes_ you."

Daniel closed his eyes for a moment. Jack could be so _dense_ sometimes. Then he came to the bed and sat down next to Jack, and took Jack's face in his hands, kissing him gently. 

Jack closed his eyes and leaned into it. Even when they broke apart, their foreheads still rested together, until Daniel pulled back and examined Jack's tired, worried face.

"So win her back," he said quietly. "She fell in love with you once, you nitwit. Somewhere deep down, she still loves both of us; I'm sure of it. So woo her. Remind her what made her fall for you in the first place."

Jack's mouth twisted in a wry smile. "You mean start working for our enemies and then goad her into almost shooting me when I come to my senses?"

"Somehow," Daniel said in his most sarcastic tone, "I very much doubt that was it."

Jack sighed. He rubbed his forehead and stared down at his feet. "Is she sleepin'?"

"No," Daniel said, reminded of his mission. "She's waiting for me to bring her pajamas. You don't happen to know which shelf she keeps them on, do you?"

"Top one?"

With the extra-wide bed, there wasn't much room in the bedroom for dressers. Fortunately the bedroom had a large closet, which contained most of their things. Daniel edged around the edge of the bed -- not bothering with the crutch; he left it leaned against the wall -- and flinched when his foot crunched on something.

"Crap." He'd forgotten about the broken lamp.

Jack looked up and smiled faintly. "Look on the bright side. If she doesn't remember how much she loved the damn thing, she won't care if it's gone."

"I'll find her another one," Daniel promised. "Ana Jarvis helped her buy it the first time. For all we know, there are a dozen like it in Stark's mansion." He found Peggy's neatly folded silk pajamas and nightgowns right where Jack said they'd be. After selecting a couple of options that he knew she liked, he edged back around the bed, trying not to step on any broken glass along the way. "I'll clean it up when I get back down."

Jack got up off the bed. "No, I got it. Need something to do."

Daniel started to object, then left him to it. He understood wanting something to keep yourself occupied.

Upstairs, he found Peggy fast asleep on the bed, still wearing all her clothes. After waiting three days for her to wake up, he couldn't help finding it jarring and unpleasant to see her sleeping again. He put the pajamas on top of the guest bureau, where she would see them when she woke up, and then sat on the chair and watched her for a little while. Her breathing was deep and even, and she twitched occasionally, eyelids fluttering. It seemed to be perfectly normal sleep, unlike the unnatural stillness of her coma in the hospital.

"Sousa," Jack said quietly from the doorway. "Go downstairs and get some rest."

"Take your own advice. You haven't had any more sleep than I have." 

Jack shook his head. "I hate napping. I won't fall asleep anytime soon. You, on the other hand, look like you're nodding off in that chair."

The only thing more annoying than having Jack herd him off to bed would be falling asleep in the chair and toppling to the floor, and he thought he might actually be close to that. He wobbled a little as he got up, which made him realize how tired he really was, gritty-eyed and aching from interrupted sleep, and much too little of it.

He had the almost overwhelming urge to kiss Peggy as she lay sleeping. Maybe just on the forehead ... but then Jack's hand settled between his shoulder blades, steering him toward the door.

"Yeah, that's it." Jack set his other hand on Daniel's arm and steered him neatly around the doorframe before he collided with it. "Bedtime for Sousas."

"You're such a jerk."

"I know," Jack said. Without breaking stride, he took the crutch at the top of the stairs when Daniel slipped his hand out of the loop -- Daniel had had the banister reinforced, and usually preferred to use it for support on the stairs -- but stayed in a hovering position, one step ahead of him, somehow managing not to get tripped on.

At the bottom of the stairs, when Jack started to hand the crutch back, Daniel took advantage of the opportunity to pull him in for a hug. Jack sighed and gave in, and they stood that way for a little while, braced on each other.

"She's gonna be okay," Daniel muttered into Jack's shoulder, and he wasn't entirely sure which of them he wanted to convince. " _We're_ gonna be okay."

Jack kissed him lightly on the temple, and gave him a gentle push toward the bedroom.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which assumptions are made and clues are discovered.

Peggy woke up foggy-brained and fuzzy-mouthed, but at least her head had stopped hurting. For awhile she lay still, watching tree branches cast sunlit patterns against the room's brightly flowered drapes. 

This room was nice, with pale wallpaper that helped fill it with light, and a tasteful quilt upon which she was lying. And she could detect no trace of herself in it at all.

It felt as if she'd fallen asleep and woke up two years later, in a life that wasn't her own.

After awhile, she sighed deeply and sat up. She need a bath, and perhaps something to change into that wasn't pajamas and hadn't been slept in. She tried the drawers of the bureau, but found them empty except for a couple of spare towels and a hairbrush, which she applied to her hair in front of the small mirror mounted on top.

It seemed to be afternoon. The room was hot, the air dry. It surprised her now that she'd ever mistaken this place for New York, but she supposed she could blame her confused state for that, and one hospital room was much like another. There was a different feeling to the air, however, a different quality to the heat. It wasn't like the stickiness of New York summers. Her blouse was wet all along the back when she stood up, where it had been in contact with the bed, but had dried by the time she was done fixing her hair.

_It's a dry heat,_ she thought. Someone had told her that once. And it seemed to be true.

The house had only a partial upstairs with two small bedrooms, one of which appeared to be in use as a home office, and a steep flight of stairs leading down to the main floor. There seemed to be no bathroom up here, so she descended quietly. The curtains in the living room were drawn, plunging the room into deep cool darkness, and the house was very quiet. Were the men gone? Sleeping? If they were still here, she didn't want to wake them up; she wished to have time to examine the house that was apparently her home without anyone looking over her shoulder. She wanted to draw her own conclusions about it.

She used the toilet and found a clean cloth to wash her face, reaching without thinking about it for a small portable chest under the sink where, it seemed, such things were kept. _This really is my house,_ she thought. Somehow those little flashes of familiarity were even more disconcerting than none at all. She poked through the cosmetics on a shelf below the mirror, finding most of them familiar, though a few brands were strange to her. New things discovered in L.A., perhaps? She reapplied lipstick, and felt a little better; at least her face in the mirror was her own.

She left the bathroom, bypassed the closed bedroom door and went into the kitchen. It, too, was sunny and light, looking out onto a small backyard overgrown with a profusion of bushes and flowers, surrounded by a high fence. As in the bathroom, she unerringly found the right cabinet for what she wanted, which at the moment was a water glass. She filled it from the tap and drank slowly. The water had a faint metallic taste, which carried the same familiar/not-familiar connotations as the rest of the house.

She was, she realized, very hungry.

"Sleep well?"

Peggy jumped and spun around. She'd no idea she was not alone. In the dim living room, Jack Thompson was just standing up from the sofa. He had a whiskey glass in one hand, and was wearing the same rumpled shirt he’d been wearing the last time she saw him, now even more rumpled, with no tie.

"Quite well. I can't complain." She took in the glass, and the half-empty bottle in his other hand. "Enjoying a liquid lunch, I see."

Jack half-smiled as he strolled lazily into the kitchen and set the bottle on the counter. "Can't sleep. Figured I'd see if I could quiet my brain down any."

Peggy didn't know how to answer. She wasn't supposed to get honesty back from him, with hardly a hint of sarcasm or mockery.

"So what do you think of the house?" he asked, swirling the whiskey around in the glass before taking another drink. He leaned a hip against the countertop. "Ring any bells?"

"It seems to be a pleasant place," she said.

"Sousa picked it out. He bought it before the rest of us moved out here. It's a little bit ..." He gestured with the whiskey glass. "... suburban, I guess, for my tastes. I'm an urban high-rise kind of guy. L.A. doesn't seem to go in for New York architecture, though, more's the pity. These little bungalows are the sort of thing they like out here." 

"Is it really the three of you living here?" she asked, and couldn't understand at first why his face crumpled a little, before he hid it; she had to run her words back to figure out what he was reacting to. "The three of us, I mean," she clarified, wondering as she said it if this hot, bright place could ever feel like home. Did the Peggy of 1948 hate it here, as Jack had said _he_ did?

Jack shrugged. He drained the glass and reached for the bottle to top it up. "When I'm here. Which is maybe one month out of three."

That still sounded like a lot to her, if his job was in New York. And she still couldn't understand what on earth 1948 Peggy thought she was doing, stringing two men along like this. Peggy remembered girls in school who used to have two or more paramours on the hook at once, and she'd known men who had mistresses in addition to their wives. Peggy found that kind of behavior detestable in men, and no more attractive in her own sex. She couldn't understand how she'd come to be that kind of person.

And if she were going to do that with anyone, _why Jack Thompson?_

Except ... with Jack this close to her, slouching in that insouciant way against the edge of the counter, she actually _could_ recognize at least part of what must have motivated the other Peggy. He was a very good-looking man. More so like this, actually, than perfectly put together with every hair oiled into place, the way she was used to seeing him. _This_ Jack, tired and slouched and wearing two days' worth of stubble, gave her a surprisingly strong urge to reach out and run her fingertips across the light wisps of blond hair just visible where the top button of his shirt was undone --

Dear Lord.

"I need a drink," she decided, and held out her empty water glass.

Jack raised an eyebrow, and poured her a small amount of alcohol in the bottom of the glass. "Let's try that much for starters. You've just come off a three-day coma, remember?"

Peggy realized as soon as she took a sip and felt it burn a trail down her throat to her empty stomach that she might have made a tactical error. However, she was not going to back down. "All I really need right now is something to eat. How do you people handle that sort of thing, anyway? The cooking duties, I mean. I sincerely hope, for your sake as much as my own, that you haven't been expecting me to cook for you, because I'm not that good at it. At least," she added reflectively, "not that I remember." The idea that she might have chosen to take on a domestic role to not just one but two men was a deeply unpleasant one.

"Believe me, Marge, we know," Jack said. Peggy managed not to grimace at the loathed nickname. "So, the way the cooking works around here, none of us are that good at it, but we each have a few things we're good at, so that's what we make." He smiled, and she knew that smile all too well, the sly boyish smile that usually went along with a comment that was going to make her struggle to refrain from punching him in the face. "Want to know what I'm good at?"

"Do tell," she said, resigned to whatever joke he was going to try to make her the butt of.

"Breakfasts," Jack said. "I learned in the Navy, believe it or not. I can whip up a darn good omelet, and pancakes that are as good as anything you'll get in a chow house. Either of those sound good?"

She was left a little dizzy with the mood whiplash between what she'd been expecting and what she actually got. "I ... they both sound good," she said, and her stomach growled as if to underscore the point.

This got a bright, startled smile out of him that was ... different, very different, from any expression she'd seen from him before -- except, maybe, the one he'd been wearing when she'd first woken up at the hospital and got her first glimpse of him. Before Peggy had time to analyze that look, or her feelings about it, he was already turning toward the refrigerator. 

"Great, I'll make both. If we have enough eggs, that is. I'm starved too, and you oughta see Daniel pack away food. Some people would probably say you can't have pancakes and omelets for dinner, but those people are flat wrong."

Peggy could only stare in silent disbelief as Jack got out a mixing bowl and then reached into the refrigerator for a carton of eggs and a bottle of milk. Jack Thompson was standing in the kitchen, in _her_ kitchen apparently, and he was cooking for her. 

She was going to need a lot more alcohol to deal with this. She groped blindly for the bottle and poured a generous slug into her glass.

"Are you making pancakes for dinner?" Daniel asked, crutching into the kitchen. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants, tied off over the stump of his leg at mid-thigh, and his hair was sleep-scruffed in a way that stirred in Peggy an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and run her fingers through it to smooth it down, especially when he gave her a smile that was vastly relieved and a little bit shy. She hesitantly returned it, and saw his eyes light up.

It was the first time she'd seen him without his prosthesis, which felt weirdly intimate. _Except of course it's not the first time at all,_ she thought. Peggy, _this_ Peggy, saw him like that every day. She firmly stopped her eyes from wandering downward; she was absolutely _not_ going to stare. It wasn't prurient curiosity, she told herself. She'd never been one of those vulgar people who stared at wounded veterans. She was only curious because it was Daniel. She hadn't even been entirely sure he was missing a leg, although she had suspected, and she hadn't known if it was above the knee or below. She just didn't know him that well.

_Except now I do, apparently._

"Got a problem with pancakes?" Jack inquired.

"Only the burned ones." Daniel casually, in passing, hooked his free arm around Jack's stomach and pulled him close enough to kiss the back of his neck before continuing on to the sink, where he poured himself a glass of water, oblivious to the fact that Peggy was now boggling at both of them. Her mental model for how the rules of this relationship were supposed to work, especially in terms of who was sleeping with whom, had just done a complete flip.

_Jack,_ on the other hand, looked distinctly uncomfortable about it, pulling subtly away from Daniel and glancing at Peggy.

"So, Peggy," Daniel said, turning away from the sink. "Did you sleep well? Bed comfortable?"

"I ... yes. It was very comfortable." She turned away, cheeks flaming. _If I'm sleeping with Daniel, and I'm also sleeping with Jack, and Daniel is ... sleeping with Jack ...?_

_...I need a drink._

She poured herself more whiskey.

"Wait, you gave her booze?" Daniel demanded of Jack.

"I didn't exactly _give,_ " Jack retorted almost angrily, vigorously whipping the pancake batter. "It's Peggy. She _took._ Now make yourself useful and see if we have any cheese."

"If you need me to do anything --" Peggy began. 

"Peggy," Daniel said gently, "sit down and let us cook for you."

"Us," Jack said, lightening up a little. "I like how it's 'us' now, even though all you're doing is handing me cheese. Or not handing me cheese, as the case may be."

Peggy sat at the small kitchen table and nursed the contents of her glass while she watched them. She saw now what she hadn't seen earlier -- hadn't been able to see, over her own preconceptions about the antagonistic relationship she remembered the two of them having. Or ... _relationship_ was too strong a word, really. They worked together, that was all. Daniel wasn't fond of Jack, and for Jack's part, she hardly thought he knew Daniel existed.

And she'd taken their casual verbal swipes at each other for a continuation of the prickly, often uncomfortable working relationship she remembered. But watching them together now, she wasn't sure what to think. She'd never seen Daniel as relaxed, as _happy_ , as he was right now, handing Jack ingredients and teasing him in a way she now recognized as playful, even affectionate.

How had this _happened?_ That was what she couldn't understand. She couldn't understand any of it, from the fact that she was apparently living with two men, to how it had happened with _these two men_ specifically, to the fundamental question of whatever had possessed her to cohabit with even _one_ man. She didn't consider herself a prude, but she wasn't _loose._ If she and Daniel had become serious about each other, which apparently they had, shouldn't they have simply wed? Money would not have been an issue, not if Daniel was able to maintain this house ...

But that would have excluded Jack.

Had it really been _that_ much of a consideration?

Peggy probed at herself, but there was nothing like trying to consciously poke at her own feelings to make them scurry away and hide. Steve's loss was still a desperate ache, a hole that would never heal. Could this ... peculiar domestic arrangement be nothing but an attempt to fill the hole in her heart? She loathed thinking of her future self as a woman so desperate that she might trade her self-respect for temporary happiness, but ...

"Dinner," Jack declared, setting a plate in front of her with a stack of pancakes and an omelet neatly folded on the side.

"How hungry do you think I am?" she asked with a laugh.

"I've seen you put food away. Hey!" This was directed at Daniel, who was poking at the skillet where another omelet was frying. "Siddown," Jack ordered, stabbing a finger at the chair across from Peggy's.

"Right away, boss. Yes sir." Daniel gave a mock salute. But there was no rancor in it. They were _playing._ It was like she'd stepped into an alternate universe.

Peggy cut off a small square of pancake, while Daniel delivered a pot of jam, another of syrup, and a dish of butter to the table before sitting down as ordered. As soon as she put the bite in her mouth, she found that she was much hungrier than she'd thought, and she practically inhaled the contents of her plate while Jack served Daniel and then took a seat himself.

"Slow down, Peggy." Daniel reached across the table to brush her hand with his, then jerked his fingers back guiltily. "You'll make yourself sick," he added.

"I feel fine. This is very good." She smiled at Jack; it took a certain amount of effort. "Thank you."

Jack dropped his gaze to his plate.

Daniel's hand lingered somewhere in the middle of the table, as if he wanted to reach across again, but didn't dare. "I ... don't suppose anything's come back?" he asked hopefully. "Of your memories, I mean."

Peggy shook her head. "Nothing," she said through a mouthful. "Total blank, I'm afraid."

There was a pensive silence at the table, which Jack broke by saying, "We need to figure out how many people we're going to tell."

"Most of the scientific division probably knows already," Daniel pointed out.

"Yeah, so we need to tell them to keep a lid on it. I mean, if we start advertising that she's lost her memory, it's gonna be an invitation to everybody she's put away in the last two years, not to mention anyone inside the department who's wondering if she's qualified --"

"Do I get a say in this?" Peggy asked sharply.

This got a couple of guilty looks, although Jack's expression turned instantly combative. "So, what, you got a better idea?"

"Yeah, Peggy, the problem here is," Daniel began, "there's a lot you don't know about --"

"So _tell_ me!" she snapped, seized with a momentary urge to throw the jam pot in their faces. "I've lost two years of my life! How am I supposed to make _any_ decisions if I don't have the necessary information?"

They looked at each other, and Jack said quietly, "She's not wrong."

Daniel turned to Peggy. "The tricky thing is figuring out where to start."

She laid her fork down. "Take me to the SSR, then. I understand there still _is_ an SSR? And we work for it? Show me the cases I'm working on. Let me start getting up to speed."

This produced instant protests from both men. "Peggy, you just got out of the hospital!"

"And? I slept all day -- and for the last three days, from what I understand." She discovered that she was clenching her fork so hard the handle was starting to bend, and set it down. "I have plenty of energy. You needn't come if you don't want to. I can drive myself -- just tell me where to go."

"God," Jack sighed. "Once she's got her teeth in something, she's like a bulldog. You know we won't have any peace until we run her over to the SSR." He pushed back his half-eaten plate and stood up.

Daniel stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Nah, I'll take her. You haven't slept at all, have you? I know you slipped off as soon as I fell asleep. Eat and go to bed." As he said it, he turned and gave Peggy a half-smile, and she was caught utterly off guard by her visceral reaction to his soft brown eyes, looking at her with that affectionate warmth. 

There _was_ something there. 

The other Peggy had fallen in love with him; this she'd known. But until this moment, it had been something abstract, something she'd been told. Now she felt as if she'd been sucker-punched. She had been thinking of the future Peggy as a different person, but they were not; they were one and the same, and those feelings were there in her, somewhere. It was the first time she'd felt them.

Which meant whatever future-Peggy felt for Jack was there somewhere inside her, too. Peggy didn't dare look at him, not right now. She didn't _want_ to feel what her other self felt for him. Not for Jack Thompson.

"Earth to Peggy?" Daniel said, with a hint of concern -- and she blinked, recalling herself. Zoning out at the table was no way to convince them she was well enough to go in to work.

"I don't mean to drag you away in the middle of your dinner," she said with sudden guilt. Most of Daniel's food was still on his plate.

"For the sake of your co-workers, you should probably take the time to put on pants, too," Jack muttered. Daniel kicked him under the table.

 

***

 

Over the rest of dinner, and then in the car, Daniel gave Peggy a jumbled version of the last two years that she desperately tried to sort into some sense of order.

It wasn't his fault. He'd started out in typical Daniel fashion, precise and detailed, starting from the best they could figure as the most recent thing she could remember (snatches of details from a case Daniel said they'd worked in late February 1946). Left to his own devices, Daniel would have meticulously filled her in on every case they'd worked from early 1946 to the present day.

But she quickly hit a wall of frustration, because she needed to know what was going on _now,_ especially since, back at the dinner table, Jack had kept interjecting unhelpful comments like, "I think that's where you must've first got the idea for SHIELD" without actually explaining what SHIELD was. They ended up in a leapfrogging series of questions and answers that took them back and forth across what Peggy was starting to realize had to be an immensely eventful couple of years. It was easier when it was just her and Daniel in the car (at least the question and answer chain was more straightforward with just two people involved) but she still felt more confused than enlightened.

"So, if I understand correctly, there's a Russian assassin running loose around the country and occasionally trying to kill us?” she asked, while trying to memorize the twists and turns of the darkening streets as Daniel drove, in the hope of being able to at least find her way back to her own home. "And no one has made it any sort of priority to catch her?"

"Oh, believe me, we've tried. At this point I think we've just decided to accept it as a job hazard." 

Peggy blinked and decided to let this one go, for now. There was just too much to absorb; she had to prioritize. "Tell me more about this SHIELD project. _My_ project. I need to know everything you know."

"The trouble, Peg, is no one knows as much about it as you do. I think you have notes, but I don't know where they are. Some of it might be at the house in our home office. I don't think you kept anything important at the SSR, not about that."

Peggy had to laugh; she couldn't help it. "I'm afraid of my own employers now?"

"Not that, exactly, but ... I told you about Vernon Masters."

It was more like he'd talked around it, at least at the dinner table. By now Peggy was getting attuned enough to the nuances between Daniel and Jack to recognize that whatever was making them reticent was something to do with Jack -- something that _Jack_ , specifically, didn't want to talk about. She had filed that away to return to later, as well. No time like the present. "You said he betrayed the SSR. But Jack was involved somehow, wasn't he?"

Daniel winced. "Look, I think that's a story Jack ought to tell you."

Frustration burst out of her. "At this point, I'm doing well if I can get either of you to tell me anything."

"Peggy ... look ... I'm sorry." He pulled over and parked at the curb, then sat for a moment with his hand hooked over the steering wheel, fingers drumming on it. "I swear we're not trying to keep things from you. It's just ... some things are a mess, okay? What's going on right now with the SSR is the biggest mess of all, and some of it's tied to Vernon, and some of it's just, I don't know, inevitable after the end of the war, I guess. Even if it never felt inevitable back when we were working in New York. It felt like the SSR would go on forever."

"Some of the workdays certainly seemed to last that long," she said, trying to smile.

His answering smile woke another of those little flutters inside her. It was going to be easy to fall back in love with Daniel, she thought, even if she was still trying to maneuver around the Steve-sized hole in her heart. But a Daniel who looked at her with affection, who was sharing a house and (apparently) a bed with her, was a Daniel she thought she could love again, even if she never got her memory back.

She tried not to ask herself if that was who she really wanted to be: Daniel's and Jack's live-in girlfriend. Was this really the highest romantic aspiration she'd learned to allow herself?

When she made no move to close the space between them, Daniel didn't either; instead he cleared his throat and reached for the car door. "Come on and see the office."

Daniel used a key to let them through a door under a sign reading _Auerbach Theatrical Agency,_ which must be this branch of the SSR's cover business. Peggy tried to look at everything as she followed him, seeking signs of familiarity. By now, however, she was trying so hard that she couldn't tell if anything was truly familiar or not. She caught a vague sense of deja vu as they climbed the stairs behind the filing cabinet, but was that real, or only something she hoped to feel?

"So this is the L.A. bullpen, straight through here," Daniel said as they reached the top of the stairs. "My office is straight ahead, and anybody who merits an office -- one of whom is you, Peg -- are around the corner."

"I have an office?" She felt a brand new kind of flutter. She had an _office._ An office of her own.

"Yep." Daniel grinned. "You're the East Coast liaison, and you're also one of my field operations managers. That's a reorganization we put into effect in late 1947. Jack did a bunch of similar stuff in New York. We were trying to streamline the agency, do more with less, I guess. In addition to the Field office, there's also --"

"Field operations?" She couldn't quite believe it. From what both Daniel and Jack had said, it appeared she was going out in the field now, but her own _office_ \--

"Agent Carter!"

Their quiet conversation had finally caught the attention of the two night-shift agents hunched over their desks, both of whom hopped to their feet and approached. One was a blocky older gentleman; the other was slight and dark-skinned with glasses. And neither one of them produced the faintest tingle of recognition.

"We heard there was a lab accident, ma'am," Glasses said as he approached, holding out his hand. "Good to see you up and about."

"Oh, yes, I'm doing much better." She beamed at him, shaking his hand. The other agent contented himself with a terse nod, to her relief.

"She's fine, as you can see," Daniel said. "Dalton, Scarpelli, back to your desks. Peggy, I'll walk you to your office."

"Which is which?" Peggy whispered as they walked through the bullpen. Daniel's name written across the glass door of a darkened office caught her attention. She was happy for him; he'd chafed so much under the restrictions imposed on him at the New York SSR.

"Dalton's the short one. You helped me hire him last year. He's got a little bit of a hero-worship thing going for you, I think."

"Oh," she said softly. Once again it felt as if pieces had dropped out of her life, and she couldn't seem to make them fit back in.

"Here you go." Daniel opened a door onto a room that was barely larger than a closet, but Peggy hardly registered the close confines. It had her name in a small brass plate on the door. There was a desk, surrounded by filing cabinets -- and _here_ , finally, she got the spark of recognition that she'd been hoping for. It wasn't a specific memory, though. It was more the recognition that her mind had been the one behind the layout of the office. From the maps papering the walls, to the way the furniture was laid out and the lipstick tucked into the desktop pencil holder, it felt _right._

"Thank you," she breathed, and she wasn't even sure who she was thanking or what she was thanking them for. Going from months of being the SSR's coffee girl, to _this_ , in the blink of an eye ... it was overwhelming.

"Right, so ..." Daniel waved a hand in the direction of the bullpen. "I'll just ... cases. Work ... stuff."

"Daniel. If you want to go home, you don't have to stay. You must be tired --"

"I slept all afternoon." His face had taken on a stubborn quality that she recognized, though whether from her own memories, or from the other Peggy's forgotten life, she couldn't tell. "I've got plenty of work to do. All your open case files are in here. Just ask me if you have any questions or need some files sent up from Records."

"I will. Er ... Daniel?" He'd started to turn away already. She didn't really _want_ to ask him, but it was more efficient than wandering the entire building in search of a room she couldn't remember. "Is there a canteen? I'd like to make a cup of tea."

She regretted asking immediately, when a flash of pain crossed his face, covered quickly with a smile. "Yeah. Of course. It's right around the corner. You've got tea things and your favorite mug in there and everything. Let me show you."

It was, in a way, a relief once Daniel was gone, apologizing his way out of the canteen and leaving her in peace to make her own tea. Having him around wasn't awkward in the same way that it was with Jack, who she had no idea how to relate to, but it was a constant source of pressure. With Jack, she didn't know how to behave, but with Daniel, she couldn't relax. She kept wanting to be the Peggy that he remembered, and feeling irrational guilt that she wasn't.

_Except I am._ She slowly stirred her tea with a spoon she'd retrieved from a drawer without thinking about it. She knew where everything in the canteen was, but like the rest of her buried memories, it only worked when she didn't think about it.

Which of course was why things were so hard with Daniel. She couldn't stop thinking long enough.

_I hate this,_ she thought with a sudden flare of anger. It was desperately tempting, in that moment, to ask for a transfer to some far-off place. Did the SSR need agents in Europe right now? She could see if Dugan's lot were hiring --

And _that_ triggered something, a sharp and startling flash of sun on snow-covered trees and Dugan hugging her and he'd asked her, hadn't he -- he'd said she could come fight with them, he'd invited her --

And then it was gone, slipping away so that all she was left with was her conscious mind's secondhand impressions of what she'd remembered. And it _was_ a memory, the first solid memory she'd had of anything that had happened to her in the last two years. It was definitely not a recollection from the war. Standing with spoon in hand, unbearably frustrated, she groped for details. She'd been with Dugan somewhere snowy -- and he'd invited her to come with the Howling Commandoes, and she -- she --

\-- couldn't remember anything else. She muttered something unladylike and rinsed her spoon before putting it back in the drawer.

But this was another solid indication that it wasn't all gone. It was all there, her missing two years, and the other Peggy was there, like an uninvited houseguest lurking in her brain.

She curled her hands around her teacup for the warmth, realizing that she was afraid. She didn't _want_ to remember any more. Only one Peggy at a time could live in her head, and she was suddenly sick to her stomach at the thought of that other Peggy, the incomprehensible one, the one who loved a man she hated and did things she found repulsive, filling her head again and washing away everything that made her who she was.

_How could I have changed so much in two years? I don't want ..._

But there was no help for it; she and that other Peggy were not separate people, and she knew it. They were one and the same. The urge to leave the SSR behind and move somewhere that she could sort out her head in peace was still strong, but it also smacked too much of running away. And besides, there was the desperate burning curiosity about what had happened to her over the last two years to make her into such a different person from the one she felt she was right now. Her future self seemed incomprehensible to her ... but, then, so did her nineteen-year-old self, the one who'd almost married Fred and had looked forward eagerly to no greater aspiration than managing a household in Hampstead and raising Fred's children.

_People do change; it's the natural order of things. But deep down, they're usually still the same people they always were ..._

Maybe future Peggy only seemed incomprehensible because Peggy had not made enough of an effort to understand her.

She took her tea back to her office to find out what was in the other Peggy's desk.

A great deal, it seemed. After poking through some drawers, Peggy decided to deal with her own missing years as she would approach any case. And the first step was a systematic review of evidence.

So she began carefully and methodically searching her own office.

The case files were interesting and would need to be reviewed later, but for purposes of her first round of evidence triage, they did not need to be looked at yet. She merely scanned the tags on the file folders to be sure she wasn't overlooking anything that struck a chord in her brain. So far, nothing was ringing a bell in the same way that she'd had the one flash of Dum-Dum Dugan in the canteen. (Of all people, her first memory so far was of _Dugan_ ; she was never, ever telling him.) She did find that future-Peggy seemed to keep separate filing cabinets for closed cases and currently open ones, which was quite sensible; well done, future self.

The cases she'd worked on in the past two years were the tracks of her professional life, but the desk and walls offered clues into her personal one. And much of what it had to tell her was what she already knew, that she hadn't allowed personal sentiment to intrude in any large way into her work life. The walls were decorated primarily with maps studded with pins that she must be using for case-tracking purposes. Most of the items on her desk were useful ones, though some also appeared to be sentimental in nature. She picked up a gold pen inscribed with a Stark logo and personalized with her initials. It seemed that she was still in touch with Howard, and she found herself smiling.

But then there were other little things, which tugged painful-sweet at the back of her mind. A potted cactus on the edge of her desk with tiny little pink blooms and a small, inexplicable lead flamingo stuck in the edge of its pot made her think of ... someone ... but it slipped away as she tried to grasp it. A baseball resting against her pen holder -- she had no interest in the game of baseball at all, could not understand why Americans followed it so intently, but when she picked up the ball and felt it nestle in the palm of her hand, she had another quick memory-flash, this one just a glimmer: she snatched it out of the air, confiscating it from an impromptu game of office baseball pitching in --

And it was gone. In Daniel's office, perhaps? She shook her head, frustrated, and put it back.

She opened her top desk drawer. Her case files had been reasonably tidy, or at least in observation of basic professional standards, but this was pure chaos. She was confronted with a welter of pens (half of them broken), lipsticks (most of them empty), pins and buttons and screws, receipts from what must have been half the takeout places in Los Angeles, scraps of paper with telephone numbers scribbled on, California postcards with half-finished messages to one elderly relative or another, sunglasses (at least four pairs), a bottle of aspirin and another of Mercurochrome, postcards _from_ elderly relatives traveling to such exotic locales as Bath and Brighton, a wadded-up stocking, forty-seven cents in change, a broken garter strap ...

She closed that drawer and decided to deal with it later.

The bottom drawers were locked. She found the key, after some searching, in the mess in the top drawer, but there was nothing special in here. The drawers primarily contained case files and a repository of spare office supplies. One of the folders, fat with menus and other items, was labeled LUNCH ORDERS. Peggy winced, feeling as if she'd been punched in the stomach; after all this time, was that still one of her functions here? The rest of her office's contents indicated that she was no longer restricted solely to office tasks. At least, she'd been assuming that she was able to do fieldwork now. Perhaps things had not changed as much as she'd thought. 

She pulled out a mimeographed takeout menu displaying different sandwiches, and another one with tacos. (Whatever those were.) There were also quite a number of scribbled notes with lunch orders on. Same as the old office, in other words. She was quite disappointed in Daniel; she would have thought better of him.

Wait ... something wasn't quite right here ...

The notes written on the pieces of paper were ... odd. Peggy frowned over them. She'd been taking lunch orders for the SSR ever since her very first day, and she knew what her notes should look like. These were oddly cluttered, not just a list of names and different kinds of sandwiches, but other comments as well. "Wednesday lunch mtg. 2 hr." On another one: "short gray hair, beard." And another: "State Dept?"

It was possible that her future self was disorganized enough to write her case notes and appointment reminders on lunch order slips and stuff them in no particular order into a file at the back of her bottom desk drawer. By this point, Peggy wouldn't put anything past her. But it didn't feel right. She might not understand everything that future Peggy had been getting up to lately ...

_... But I do know how my mind works, most of the time._

And if she were going to conduct a secret investigation and hide the notes, she couldn't think of a better place to do it than in a folder of lunch orders.

It was so paranoid that it bordered on the ridiculous. And yet, the notes didn't seem chaotic enough to be truly random. Some of them had little numbers penciled next to them. When she laid them out in order on her desktop, more complicated notes emerged, which were beginning to look to her like the notes on a long-term surveillance project: meeting places, dates, descriptions of people she had no way to identify. A few of the lunch notes had letters with little pencil tick marks through them, which spelled out what appeared to be names, none of them familiar to her -- but of course, at this point, they wouldn't be.

The most recent of the various dates on the notes was just five days before the date she'd been told in the hospital was the current one, and therefore two days before her lab accident.

If it had really been an accident.

Peggy sat back in her chair. A small shiver ran through her, made up of equal parts nervousness and excitement.

_It's true. I was conducting a secret investigation._

_I wonder if Daniel knows about it?_

Then, on the heels of that thought, a more ominous one: 

_I wonder if Daniel is involved._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the plot thickens.

It was an overwhelming relief to Daniel to see Peggy in her element again. He'd had his doubts about bringing her in to work, but the way she'd visibly perked up and gained confidence as soon as she stepped into her office had salved something in his heart. There was something about seeing her so lost and uncertain that sent his world wobbling off its axis.

But she still didn't remember. Some part of him had hoped that walking into the SSR building would bring back the memories she'd lost, but it hadn't. She might be back in her proper environment -- and Daniel felt it was obvious that Peggy herself thought so, whether she realized it or not -- but she was still just as blank on the details as she had been at the house.

She seemed content to work on her own, so Daniel left her to it. He was tired, but not particularly sleepy after napping through the afternoon, and he did have work to do.

Concentrating was the hard part, though. He rolled an incident report form into the typewriter and then found himself staring at it blankly, thinking about Peggy.

_What happens if she never remembers?_

As far as Peggy herself was concerned, he had a feeling she'd be fine. She had a way of landing on her feet, and she was already starting to pick up the details she'd missed. Her lost two years might frustrate her, but she would learn to compensate for it. Even if this entire mess blew up the SHIELD negotiations, Peggy had no reason to be emotionally invested in the outcome anyway. She didn't even remember that it had been important to her. 

_For the three of us, though ..._

He drummed a pencil idly on the desktop. It had been easier to put on a brave face for Jack than it was to convince himself. Their hard-won happiness was balanced on a razor's edge; all three of them knew it. Any one of a hundred things could bring it crashing down.

_I don't think any of us expected the straw that broke the camel's back would be one of us forgetting about the other two._

"Chief!"

Daniel jumped, and glowered at Samberly, who had appeared in his office doorway.

"You're here! Is Agent Carter here? She's not wandering the streets, is she?"

"She's not brain-damaged," Daniel snapped. _I hope._ "She checked out of the hospital. What did you need her for?" Although he knew better than to get his hopes up when Samberly was involved, he couldn't help a tiny lurch in his chest. "Have you figured out how to get her memories back?"

"Not ... as such ... exactly," Samberly hedged. "Actually, Chief, it's you I wanted to see anyway."

"Really."

"I need you to come down to the lab with me."

"So help me, Samberly, if you're planning on testing something on me --"

"No, no." The scientist raised his hands in quick placation. "No ... there's something I want you to see, Chief. Something important."

The sincerity in Samberly's manner made it at last through Daniel's layers of worry and irritation. He pushed back his chair. "All right. Show me."

They went through the bullpen, Daniel glancing over his shoulder to see that the door of Peggy's office was closed with a stripe of light showing underneath. He followed Samberly down the hall to the main lab complex. It was nearly deserted at this late hour, although there was always someone around who couldn't be parted from a late-night experiment, and tonight was no exception. There was a scientist near the door, sitting at a lab stool making notes, and a pair of them down at the far end with their heads together over a piece of complicated electronics.

Samberly glanced at the scientist nearest the door with exaggerated suspicion, took hold of Daniel's arm and pulled him away, holding a finger to his lips. He could no more clearly have indicated that he was up to something if he'd been waving a sign above his head.

"What?" Daniel asked, exasperated.

"Shhhh!"

The loud hiss got a look from the scientist at the door. Samberly glared at him until he went back to his note-taking.

"Samberly, I'm five seconds from going back to my office --"

"No, no. This is important." His whisper was less piercing, and actually managed to stay restricted to their corner of the lab. "So here's the device that we think was used on Peggy. Not sure if I'd get that close, if I were you ..."

Daniel, who had been leaning an elbow on the lab counter, jerked away when he realized Samberly was indicating something mere feet from him. In typical SSR fashion, the only measure in place to protect bystanders from the object that had apparently stolen two years of Peggy's memories was a large, handwritten sign reading DANGER, DON'T TOUCH!!

"How close is safe?" Daniel asked, taking a few steps back.

"That's the thing, Chief. We're not sure yet."

Daniel took another couple of steps backwards for good measure. He'd seen it after Peggy's accident, but not up close. It was one of the SSR's many confiscated pieces of HYDRA technology, an incomprehensible-to-Daniel mess of chrome, wires, and bulbous glass tubes, about the size of a hatbox overall.

"What makes it turn on?"

"Haven't figured that out, either. We can't seem to replicate the results."

Daniel gave him a narrow-eyed look. "Wait, you mean you've been _trying?"_

"Of course, how else are we supposed to understand how it works? Anyway, Leroy is a terrible physicist. If his mind gets wiped it's no loss."

Daniel blinked and shook his head. "... Right. So, I assume you didn't bring me down here to tell me that you still don't know anything."

"It's not something I know," Samberly said. "Really more like something that's possible, if unlikely. Very unlikely. Actually, there's probably a perfectly reasonable explanation, which means it's very likely that it's not _even_ likely --"

"Samberly!" Daniel snapped, which at least stopped the verbal spillage. "Spit it out, man."

"Right." Samberly took a key from his pocket and unlocked one of the cabinets. "First of all, these are photographs that were taken of the scene after Agent Carter's accident."

He spread them out on the countertop. Daniel had seen these before, too, and barely glanced at them. At least the photos had been taken after Peggy had been rushed to the hospital following her collapse, so he didn't have to look at her lying limply there.

He hadn't been in the lab when it had happened, but he'd seen her immediately afterwards, when an anxious lab tech had come running to his office. "Chief Sousa, there's been an accident --" The words still rang in his head.

"Chief?" Samberly said, and Daniel pulled himself back to the present.

"Right, you took photos, got it. And I'm going to assume there's something _in_ the photos ..."

"Right here." Samberly planted a finger on one of them. Daniel looked. The HYDRA device was just visible at the edge of the photo, and a scattering of other items were spread out in disarray on the lab table. Some sort of gun-looking thing with a flared muzzle, a tangle of wires attached to what looked like a timer, a clutter of beakers and scales, and behind those ...

"Is that the memory erasing thing?"

"We call it a mem-o-tron now."

"I -- what -- okay, sure. But that's it, isn't it?" Daniel frowned, looking from the photos to the lab around him, lining up the picture with the actual lab counters. Peggy had been found over there ... "Where is it now?"

"That's the thing, Chief. I got to thinking about it, and it took me forever to find it. I finally turned it up in the back of a cabinet over there, behind some stuff we haven't used in months." He pointed across the lab. "Completely discharged and turned down to its lowest setting."

Now he could see why Samberly had been acting so squirrelly earlier. Daniel dropped his voice as well. "You think someone used it on Peggy and then hid it?"

"I don't know, Chief. We cleaned up the lab after the, er, incident, to reduce the chance of similar incidents. Somebody could've chucked it in the back of the cabinet then. It's a strange place for it, though. And I don't remember seeing it while we were cleaning up."

Daniel tapped his fingers on the countertop. Things had been chaotic after Peggy's accident, but still ... "Didn't someone in the lab see Peggy touch the device? Dr. Wescott, wasn't it? Where is he now?"

"He's part of the team that's been working on figuring that out." Samberly reached for the HYDRA device, but stopped himself at the last minute. "He's home now. After she woke up, most of the staff took a break. We'd been working around the clock since -- well --"

"Yeah, I get it. Nobody knew if she was going to wake up at all." It was easier to say now that she was conscious and apparently unharmed aside from her missing memory. "But you're still here."

"I went home for a few hours and caught a nap. That's when I had my eureka moment about the mem-o-tron and realized it was in the photos but not anywhere in sight now. You know, they say the subconscious mind works best when you just let it work and don't try to force it. I had a professor who used to do his best thinking hanging upside-down from his --"

"Samberly."

"-- Chief?"

"Good work. I mean it."

"Oh. I, uh. Thanks, Chief." He looked startled, and Daniel had to remind himself that, personal abrasiveness aside, the man had been coming through for them in a major way. He was genuinely good at what he did. Maybe it would be a good idea to say it a little more often.

"Have you told anyone else about this?"

Samberly shook his head. "I brought it to you first."

"Good work. Don't talk to anyone but me about it. I especially don't want this to get back to Wescott, just in case." Daniel swept the photos together, started to hand them back to Samberly, then slid out the one that showed the memory device. "I'm keeping this one, all right? If anyone else looks through these, I want to make sure they don't see what you saw."

"Right, Chief." Samberly tapped the photos on the edge of the countertop to align their edges. He looked up, frowning. "Do you think he tried to hurt her?"

"If Wescott is responsible for her memory loss, he didn't just _try."_ Anger didn't help, Daniel told himself. Punching Wescott in the face _definitely_ wouldn't help. They didn't even know if the guy had done anything wrong. "So, if you lab boys have spent the last three days studying the wrong device, do you think you can see about, I don't know what you'd call it, running the memory thing backwards and getting her memories back?"

Samberly now wore the same aggrieved look that Jack used to get, back at the New York office, when a new recruit dropped his gun or stabbed himself in the thumb while trying to pick locks. "Chief, that's not -- that is so very _not_ how it works that I can't even begin to --"

"Samberly, you're on my good side right now, probably more than you've ever been. Don't ruin the moment. You built the thing in the first place, right? Can whatever it does be undone?"

"I ..." Samberly hesitated. "I don't know. I'll try."

"Thank you. For right now, though ..." He took in how tired Samberly looked. A few hours' nap wasn't enough to make up for three days' sleep deficit, as he knew all too well himself. "Go home. Sleep. Eat. We're not on a clock right now. And don't talk to anyone about this, except me -- or Chief Thompson," he added.

"Not Agent Carter?"

"I ... not yet," Daniel decided. She should hear it from him first. "Where's the, uh, mem-o-tron right now?"

Samberly picked up a briefcase off the lab bench and patted it. "Gonna take it home. I can look at it there without anyone noticing a thing."

"Samberly, you are much better at this spy thing than I ever realized."

It was a bit of a backhanded compliment, but Samberly's cheery "Thanks, Chief!" seemed to be genuine.

Rather than going back to his office after Samberly left, Daniel went down to Records and pulled Wescott's personnel file. Dr. Francis Wescott had been at the West Coast SSR for a little over six months. He was one of the transfers the D.C. office had sent out west in response to Daniel's requests for more people to make up the staffing shortfall after the Arena Club affair had left both his office and Jack's department badly undermanned. At the time, Daniel hadn't been very picky; he just needed enough people to get the job done. 

Based on the file, there was nothing particularly striking about Wescott. He had a background in chemistry and engineering during the war, and had moved to D.C. from Philadelphia and then to California. No known Communist sympathies or other black marks in his past; no disciplinary notes in his record since joining the West Coast bureau. He seemed to be an average employee, neither outstandingly brilliant nor unusually troublesome.

Daniel tucked the file back into place after copying down a few notes that he stuffed into his pocket. He'd do a little more checking into Wescott's background and references ... tomorrow.

Tonight, though, his eyes were starting to burn from exhaustion. He left Records and went up to Peggy's office. The door was still closed, and he tapped lightly on it.

He thought he heard a startled flurry of scrambling and shuffling of papers.

"Peggy?" Daniel tried the door and was surprised to find it locked.

"Just a minute!" There was some rattling on the inside of the door, and it opened to reveal Peggy smiling brightly at him.

Daniel was very familiar by now with Peggy's "I am up to something" look. He took a quick glance into the room, but nothing was visibly out of place, though some of the filing cabinets stood open. "How's it going up here? Anything jog a memory?"

"Not yet," Peggy said brightly. "But I'll keep looking." She sighed and tucked a strand of hair into place behind her ear, a gesture so achingly familiar that Daniel had to fight to keep from reaching out to brush his hand across her curls. "There's just so _much._ Two years is a long time. I hardly know where to begin."

"There might be more than you know." He closed the door behind him, shutting them both inside the office.

Peggy took a slow step backward. "Daniel?"

"Some new evidence has come to light," he said softly. "The loss of your memories may not have been an accident. Someone might have done it intentionally."

Rather than looking shocked or angry, Peggy brightened. "That's a relief."

"Wait ... what?"

"Well, it means I wasn't careless or clumsy," she pointed out. "And if it was done intentionally, then they might know how to undo it."

"Except it also means they might still be after you," Daniel retorted.

"Well ... there is that." She looked conflicted, and cast a quick glance toward the desk. "Do you have a suspect?"

"Right now I'm leaning towards a guy named Francis Wescott, one of the scientists. He's the only witness to the accident you supposedly had. He claimed he saw you accidentally come into contact with a HYDRA-made thingumabob that made you collapse. But I have another guy who says your memories might have been erased using a device made especially for it."

"What sort of device?" she asked, eyes bright and intent.

"That memory thing, from the time you -- except you wouldn't remember that now," he amended. "It's a doohickey the SSR was working on that erases a few seconds of memory. At least that's what it used to do. It's not supposed to be able to take away two years of memories, but maybe Wescott, or whoever, found a way to crank it up."

"And is it reversible?" she asked.

He took the coward's way out. "I ... don't know. I'd have to ask my guy. He's working on it right now."

"Someone you trust?" she asked. "Because, Daniel, if the lab is compromised --"

"I do trust him, surprisingly. At least for this." He caught her sneaking another glance at her desk. "Peggy, did you find something?"

"Nothing I can understand." This, at least, had the ring of truth to Daniel's ears. Peggy rubbed at her forehead and looked suddenly very tired. "There's just so much. I don't know what to do with any of it."

He reached out before he could stop himself and rested a hand on her arm. She looked a little surprised, which hurt, but she didn't pull away. "Let's go home," he said gently. "Get some sleep. We can talk to Jack; he might have ideas --"

"No," Peggy said quickly.

"What do you mean?"

"We can't tell him," Peggy said in a flat, firm voice.

"What? Why not?"

She stared at him with a look that must be as baffled as the one he was giving her, melting slowly into comprehension. "Because he's Jack Thompson, that's why not. I know it's different for you than it is for me, but this is my _life_ we're talking about. If he's involved, we can't let him know we might be onto him."

Daniel let out an incredulous laugh; he couldn't help it. "He's not involved!"

"How do you know?" she asked quietly. "You won't tell me everything, but I can read between the lines, and I've found enough in the files from the last couple of years to have an idea that there has been a lot of corruption in the SSR lately. And Jack was involved in that, wasn't he?"

Daniel struggled to find a way to talk about it that was fair to Jack while also being honest. "He made the right decision in the end," he tried at last.

"So he _was_ involved."

"Yes, but Peggy, I swear to you, if someone is trying to -- to hurt you, Jack would never be involved in that."

She looked at him for a long moment, searching his face for ... for what, he didn't know, and it seemed to him that she was on the verge of saying something, but instead she turned away. "There's just so _much,"_ she said again, sounding weary.

"Then let's go home." He held out a hand. After a hesitation, she smiled a little and took it. Daniel tried not to feel delighted about that, and failed.

"Promise me you aren't going to tell Jack," she said, and his elation collapsed.

"Jack's not your enemy, Peggy."

"You seem very sure of that."

"I'd stake my life on it."

"Daniel," she said. "Please. For me."

That was fighting dirty, and he had a feeling that she was very aware of it. He felt, as he had at other times with Jack and Peggy, as if he was caught between two opposing forces pulling him in opposite directions. He had to pick a side or be torn in two. But this time, he knew what he had to go with. "I'm sorry, Peggy. I can't keep this from him. I won't. It involves all three of us, and it's not fair."

Her mouth turned down at the corners. "If that's what you want," she said evenly, and retrieved her hand. She walked ahead of him, out to the car.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are Jarvises.

The entire household was awakened in the morning by urgent pounding on the door.

Peggy was already up. She'd slept for a couple of hours and then woke up when the morning sun stabbed between the curtains of the guest bedroom into her eyes. She found clean clothes that fit her folded neatly on a chair at the foot of the bed. The house was silent, the door to the downstairs bedroom closed. 

When she and Daniel had got in last night, the house had been dark and quiet. Peggy had retired upstairs, while Daniel, she assumed, went to bed with Jack ... and was probably still there.

The whole situation was so terribly strange and alien to her. She didn't have any problem with other people having their own peculiar domestic arrangements. She'd certainly seen all manner of them during the war. It was being _part_ of those peculiar domestic arrangements that unsettled her so badly, not to mention the specific people involved ...

She resolved not to think about it for awhile. Chewing on a cold pancake by way of breakfast, she began to poke around the house. It felt like snooping, but she reminded herself that it was her house too.

She was going through files in the home office upstairs, and had just unearthed a treasure trove of what she was fairly sure were files relating to this SHIELD thing Daniel had told her about, when the knocking started.

Peggy hurried downstairs and peeked through the peephole. It was a couple, the man carrying a basket. Neighbors, presumably? She wasn't sure what sort of relations Daniel had with his neighbors, and contemplated pretending not to be home, but the woman knocked again, so Peggy opened the door.

She was unprepared to be almost knocked off her feet when the neighbor woman piled into her and hugged her so hard that Peggy let out an involuntary squeak and had to stop herself from employing a self-defense move she'd learned in the SOE that would probably have broken the woman's arm.

"Miss Carter! You did not tell us you were out of the hospital!"

"I ... forgot?" Peggy managed, searching her memory for anything Daniel might have mentioned that would explain how she knew this woman or give a clue as to her name.

The woman pulled back and gripped Peggy by the shoulders. "You," she declared, "are very naughty. But you look very well. Much, much better than you did when we visited you in the hospital." There were tears in her eyes, Peggy saw to her shock, just before the woman turned to the man behind her, who also looked completely unfamiliar. "Edwin, where is the -- ah, thank you, my love." She took the basket. "We brought you breakfast! A proper Hungarian breakfast with crepes and pastries and sausage."

"Good morning, Miss Carter." The man tipped his hat to her.

"Good morning," Peggy returned politely, taking the basket and bracing to fend off another hugging incident if one appeared imminent. The basket did smell delicious, and Peggy could think of no graceful way of extricating herself from the couple, who showed no inclination to leave. "Would you come in, uh ... Edwin?"

The man's briefly startled look let her know that she'd picked the wrong option, although she had no way to know _how_ it was wrong. _It's a nickname his wife or girlfriend or whatever she is uses for him? I usually call them Mr. and Mrs. whatever-their-name-is? Someone give me a clue here ..._

She took the basket into the kitchen. As she passed through the living room, the door to Daniel's bedroom started to open and then closed with a hasty click. 

"Will you have tea?" Peggy asked, and then hoped she could figure out where the tea was.

"Don't trouble yourself if you're still unwell, Miss Carter," the man said.

"No, no, I feel very well indeed." Last-name basis, then -- if only she could find a way to determine what their last name was. The kettle at least was obvious, sitting on the back of the stove. Peggy filled it. "Won't you have something to eat?" she suggested, waving the basket at them.

This at least got the red-haired woman busy, spreading out the contents of the basket on the table. By the time Daniel crutched into the kitchen, yawning and tousle-haired, Peggy had realized that she wouldn't have to answer any difficult questions if her mouth was full. And the food really _was_ excellent.

"Morning, Jarvis, Mrs. Jarvis," Daniel said. He dumped out the cold dregs in the coffeepot and began filling it. Peggy breathed an inward sigh of relief; at least now she knew what to call them.

The conversation that followed was stilted, and mostly consisted of Daniel and Mr. Jarvis making polite small talk, while both of them kept looking at Peggy as if they expected _her_ to say something. She was vastly relieved when Mr. Jarvis suggested that Miss Carter was probably very tired, and Peggy put in hastily that yes, she _was_ tired, and saw them to the door, where she didn't manage to escape without another hug from Mrs. Jarvis. She got an awkward pat on the shoulder from Mr. Jarvis, who also leaned close to her and whispered, "You will be reassured to know the _item_ is still safe, Miss Carter." He followed this up with a wink.

"Oh, I -- that's excellent," she whispered back, wondering what in the world they were talking about.

Mrs. Jarvis rolled her eyes with an indulgent air and took her husband's arm. "Come along, dear. Miss Carter must rest."

Peggy closed the door behind them, put on the chain for good measure, and demanded of Daniel in a fierce undertone, "Who are those people?!"

"Edwin and Ana Jarvis. Two of your closest friends. You probably could tell them about your, uh, your condition, you know. I really doubt they're conspiring against you."

"Well, how was I supposed to know!"

Daniel sobered. "That's a good point. I guess I should make a list of everyone you know and trust. Though it wouldn't be very long. The Jarvises, mostly ... and probably Rose ... most likely Wilkes too ... and Stark, heaven help us all ..."

"Daniel, the only person I know in that entire list is Howard Stark." She tried not to sound despairing.

The bedroom door opened and Jack came out, tucking his shirttails into his trousers. He'd stayed out of sight the entire time the Jarvises were in the house; Peggy hadn't even been sure he was still there, and tried not to tense up at the sight of him.

She was relieved to find that she seemed to be experiencing no untoward softer feelings for Jack this morning. She suspected it was irrational to be as resistant to it as she was, but it felt as if her body and emotions had betrayed her, forcing her into a liaison with someone she very reasonably disliked. It even felt as if Jack had stolen Daniel as her ally, though she knew that was probably unfair.

"I assume the coast is clear," Jack said, smothering a yawn behind his hand.

"There are Hungarian pastry things in the kitchen," Daniel told him. "Mrs. Jarvis told me the name, but I forget. Anyway, I saved you one of the apricot ones."

Peggy gave Daniel a wordless, questioning look, and he responded with a headshake -- he hadn't told Jack yet. It was slightly unnerving how easily he seemed to be able to read her unspoken question.

"Not that I'm going to refuse a pastry," Jack said, "but I hope that's coffee I smell."

"Fresh made," Daniel said. As they turned toward the kitchen, one of his hands settled casually in the small of Jack's back, resting on top of the dress shirt. "And we found something at the SSR that you need to hear about."

Peggy quietly made herself a cup of tea in the kitchen while Daniel told Jack about Wescott and the memory device. There were a few details she hadn't heard before, and she squashed her urge to ask questions about the things she didn't know, such as who Samberly was.

Jack leaned forward, the half-eaten pastry forgotten in one hand. "You think she's still in danger?"

"If someone erased her memories on purpose, they must have had a reason, and that reason hasn't gone away just because they found a nonviolent way to get her out of the picture."

Jack whistled softly. "Well, I guess it's not like we didn't know the SSR's rotten. This suggests someone's actively gunning for her." He leaned back in his chair, breaking pieces off the pastry. "Think Wescott's working alone? If it's him, I mean. I don't know of anybody we didn't catch in the cleanup, which I guess just means they're good at hiding their tracks."

Peggy kept her face impassive, and wished again that Daniel had respected her desire not to tell Jack what they'd learned. She didn't want him as an ally in this. Didn't trust him not to be colluding with the enemies she hadn't even known she had.

_Is it possible that he got close to me only to -- no, that sounds paranoid even to me._

"No, everyone I knew about was already turfed out in our cleanup operations after Vernon disappeared," Daniel said. "Did she ever mention anything to you --" He stopped, shook his head, and looked at Peggy with warm sympathy in his brown eyes, causing her heart to do the flipping-over thing that let her know that, in some other life, she had loved this man, and might learn to love him again. "Peggy, I don't meant to talk about you like you aren't here. It's just, if you and Jack _did_ talk about it, you wouldn't know --"

"We didn't," Jack said. He was staring intently at Peggy, but she couldn't tell if the look in his eyes was concern or prurient curiosity; she didn't know him well enough. "You've always played your cards close to the vest, Marge. We knew you were working on SHIELD, and you've shared some of the details with us, but only some."

She did wish he'd stop using that vile nickname. "It doesn't sound as if I trusted either one of you very well," Peggy said, and then felt a quick stab of regret when both of them looked as if she'd slapped them.

The flash of hurt on Jack's face vanished almost immediately, covered with a sideways smirk; the look lingered much longer on Daniel's expressive features. "Maybe not, but I think it was more that you didn't want to drag us down along with you if things went sideways," Jack said. "You've been calling in favors and setting the gears into motion to set up your own private spy agency. A lot of what you've been doing, if seen through the wrong lens, could look like treason, especially with everyone on high alert about Communists right now."

Peggy thought about those coded notes in her office. It would look bad if those were found, she had to admit. 

_You will be reassured to know the item is still safe, Miss Carter ..._

And Daniel had said she was close friends with the Jarvises. Had she given them something important to keep away from the SSR for her?

"Where do the Jarvises live?" she asked, and got baffled looks from Jack and Daniel, which made her realize that it must sound like a total non sequitur from their point of view.

"In Stark's mansion," Daniel said. "Jarvis is his butler. You ... didn't know that, did you."

"No," Peggy said thoughtfully. That _would_ be a good place to hide something. Security would be top-notch, if she knew Howard.

"Well," Jack said. He stood up and brushed the sugar and crumbs off his hands. "As enlightening and disturbing as this conversation has been, we have jobs to get to. Peggy, are you coming in to work, or staying here?"

"Staying here, I think, if there are no urgent cases I'm needed on. I've already examined the contents of my desk at the SSR, and I'd like to go through the files in the house as well."

"I don't think you should be left alone," Daniel argued. "Not if someone's after you."

"Don't I get a say in this?" Peggy inquired archly. "Physically, I feel fine; there's no reason why I can't defend myself. In fact, if I do have a mysterious enemy, I would be delighted if they decide to reveal themselves."

Jack clapped Daniel on the shoulder. "Take it from someone who's had a taste of her right hook, Sousa -- if anyone shows up to the house, they're in more danger than she is."

"I punched you?" Peggy asked, making no attempt to hide her delight.

"Knocked his lights clean out." Daniel cheered up somewhat at the memory.

"You two don't need to look so cheerful about it," Jack grumbled. "Anyway, you can argue about it if you want to. I'm gonna go shave." His hand lingered on Daniel's arm, pulling away with an affectionate brush of his fingertips over the other man's knuckles as he left the kitchen.

Peggy had to look away, busying herself with cleaning up the remains of breakfast instead. She just could not get used to that.

"You sure you'll be okay here?"

"I'll be fine, Daniel." In truth, she was greatly looking forward to being alone in the house, relieved of the awkwardness of trying to cope with the way the two of them related to her, and to each other.

"I know it's useless to say this to you, but please try to be careful." Daniel's hands twitched in what Peggy recognized as an aborted attempt to reach for her.

He was trying so hard to be careful of her. It must be so strange and difficult for him. Pushing past a barrier within herself, she decided to make the first move this time, and reached out to take Daniel's hand. A look of startled delight spread across his face.

"Thank you," she said, squeezing his hand. "For everything."

"I -- well -- you're welcome. Of course." He turned his hand over, lacing their fingers together. The warm pressure of his hand in hers felt comfortable and familiar, another small echo of that other Peggy's feelings.

"You had best get to work," she said, smiling at him. His eyes crinkled up as he smiled back; he hesitated, then gave her hand another squeeze before reluctantly freeing himself and going off to get dressed for work.

It wasn't until he was out of the kitchen that she reluctantly acknowledged to herself that she had been, at least in part, attempting to distract him from arguing further about leaving her alone. The worst part was that it had worked, and she'd known it would.

But it had also been nice. She hadn't even thought about dating anyone since Steve. There was something encouraging about seeing this evidence that two years had mended the Steve-shaped hole in her heart, at least enough to allow other love inside.

She stayed in the kitchen, cleaning up the breakfast things, until Daniel called from the living room, "Peggy, we're leaving!"

"See you this evening!" she called back.

"C'mon, loverboy, she doesn't need you hovering," she heard Jack say, and there were the unmistakable sounds of Daniel being hustled out the door.

After the door closed behind them, she dried her hands on a tea towel and came into the living room to peek out the front blinds. The two of them were engaged in some sort of active conversation as they went briskly down the front walk, Jack's hands moving as he talked, Daniel's head tilted to the side.

_Was I happy in that other life?_ she wondered, watching as the two of them got into Daniel's green car. Something Jack had said made Daniel laugh, and she was irritable at how jealous it made her feel.

_If I don't get my memories back, is it a life I want to go back to?_

She could picture herself keeping house with Daniel, with an ease that surprised her. She had not imagined anything of the sort in the life she remembered, but then, she hardly knew the man yet. The other Peggy had had two years to get to know him, and apparently to fall in love with him.

And with Jack ...

If that was indeed what was going on here.

But the ease and comfort between Jack and Daniel suggested to her that their unusual domestic arrangement was not merely one of convenience. _Inconvenience_ was more like it. The way Jack had hidden at the arrival of the Jarvises was a reminder of the disaster that they were all three flirting with. Doing this thing together meant risking their reputations and careers every day. However bizarre it seemed to her, however unthinkable that it could have happened, somehow a genuine bond seemed to have grown between them -- something that had led all three of them to court constant risk by living together.

And now she had been given an opportunity to make those choices all over again. A second chance, perhaps, to choose more wisely than her other self had done.

Thinking about this, she went into the home office. There was no rush to get over to Howard's place; Jack and Daniel would be gone all day. And the more she understood of her other self's work, the better she would know what else she might be looking for.

The home office appeared to be shared between herself, Daniel, and Jack. It wasn't divided up in any formal way, but it amused her that she could tell, as she looked through the contents of the filing cabinets, that different hands had been maintaining them. Daniel's filing was neat and precise, with everything cross-referenced and every report typed in full; she recognized it from the New York SSR. She could identify her own filing style from having looked through her SSR office. Jack's particular way of keeping files seemed to be similar to her own (messier than Daniel's, though not a disaster) -- the biggest difference was that the handwriting was not hers.

After a couple of hours with the files, she felt more confident about being able to step into her other self's shoes. She still didn't know, and would never know unless her memories came back, exactly what her future self had been planning for SHIELD; that other Peggy's thought processes were now lost to her. But in future Peggy's copious files, she was able to find the foundations that she had laid to build an agency upon. And it looked to Peggy as if she'd been very close to launching the project. It looked as if she intended to use one of Howard's properties for its initial headquarters. Howard was involved much more deeply than Peggy had expected; paging through file after file of budgetary projections, she found that the fledgling agency was going to be initially reliant on Howard's fortune for its operations, though she also found various grant applications and indications that she'd gone scrounging for other sources of funding. There were projections of the new agency's staffing needs -- it looked like she planned to have both a scientific division and a fieldwork wing -- and one whole drawer was full of abridged SSR staff files, which she must have copied from the SSR's records department. They were divided primarily into two sections, "Yes" and "Maybe." Peggy wondered if she had already sounded out any of these people about leaving the SSR, but that, like so many other things, would have to remain a mystery to her for now. However, if she'd been wrong about the trustworthiness of at least one of these people, it would be a starting place for collecting a list of suspects besides Dr. Wescott.

_His_ file, she noted, was not included among her SHIELD picks, though Jack's and Daniel's were.

She stacked the files to one side and went to call a cab. She'd learned all she could here, at least without spending a lot of quality time going over these personnel files with a fine-toothed comb, but that would go much faster if she did it with Daniel. At least he, unlike her, would know who these people _were._

It was time to go pay a visit to Howard, and find whatever she'd hidden with him.

 

***

 

She had forgotten, until the cab pulled up outside the house, that she didn't know where Howard lived. "Just a moment, please!" she called out the door. There was a telephone directory in the living room, but Howard did not appear to be listed. Peggy rummaged frantically until she turned up a piece of Stark stationery in the home office, with what looked like a shopping list scribbled on it.

"So sorry," she panted, flinging herself into the back of the cab, and held up the sheet of paper. "Go here, please."

The cab let her out in the sweeping front drive of the Stark estate, which was just as ostentatious and ridiculous as she expected from Howard. The driver had the grace not to offer any unpleasant innuendo about her reasons for visiting, so she tipped him well and strolled up the front walk. As soon as the cab pulled away, Peggy changed direction and hastily slipped around the side of the building. She climbed over a low wall and found herself beside a pool. There was no one else out here, but from inside she heard voices and the clinking of cutlery and dishes.

This place had the haunting familiar/not-familiar feeling that she was starting to get used to. She must have spent quite a lot of time here, in the life she couldn't remember. However, her conscious mind refused to offer any useful details about where she might have hidden the unknown object she was looking for. Now that she'd seen the size of the place, the sheer impossibility of her task became evident to her: she had no idea what she was even looking for, and an infinity of places to look for it.

Peggy sighed. She was simply going to have to ask the Jarvises. It would help if Howard was home. _Him,_ she was reasonably confident she could trust. The Jarvises were an unknown quantity, but she might have no choice.

"Miss Carter?" Mr. Jarvis stepped out onto the edge of the patio abutting the pool, carrying a pair of garden shears, and stared at her in bafflement. "I'm afraid I didn't hear you come in."

"I didn't want to bother anyone," she said with a smile. "I -- er -- you mentioned the item I gave you. Might I see it, please?"

"It's where you left it," he assured her. "It hasn't been touched."

"Yes ... well ... there's a slight problem." Last chance to change her mind, before flinging herself onto a stranger's mercy. "Is Howard in residence, please?"

"He's out of the country at the moment. Miss Carter, are you quite all right?"

Well, she _did_ trust Howard, and this man worked for Howard. Daniel had said the Jarvises were friends of hers. If this state of amnesia was her new normal, she couldn't live forever in a state of paranoia regarding her other self's friends, even if future Peggy appeared to have suffered a few lapses of judgment, particularly where Jack Thompson was concerned.

"Yes ... mostly. You see, I don't know what I gave you. My memory has been ... damaged." She smiled ruefully. "I don't remember you at all, but Daniel tells me that we were -- are -- were friends."

"We are," he said softly, staring at her. "Miss Carter, what has happened to you?"

"I don't know," she said, and tried to smile again. "I don't remember."

To her dismay, the joke not only failed to emerge with the jaunty attitude she was going for, but she could feel the smile crumple, and realized she was dangerously close to tears.

She hadn't been able to allow herself to indulge in emotions regarding her current situation. If she felt anything, she would feel too much. And she'd had to hold Daniel, and most particularly Jack, at arm's length; she certainly couldn't let down her emotional walls around them. And now she was teetering on the edge of an emotional display in front of a perfect stranger.

A perfect stranger who, according to Daniel, had been her other self's friend. There was that, at least.

Before she knew what was happening, Mr. Jarvis guided her to a chair with light touches to her shoulder and arm. "Sit here, please. I'll bring you a drink."

"I don't need anything," she gasped out, walking herself back from that emotional edge. His distance helped; he looked concerned, but unlike Daniel, he did not look like he was one momentary lapse of self-control from flinging his arms around her.

"I rather think that you do. One moment, please." He gave her arm another light touch, and then hurried off.

By the time he came back with a glass of whiskey -- and his wife -- she had herself in hand again, and had managed to put together a selective version of the truth to tell them.

"Miss Carter, what is this about your memories?" Ana Jarvis asked, sitting down on her other side as Peggy reached to take the glass from Mr. Jarvis.

"I suffered an accident in the lab, as I believe you know," Peggy said, sipping from the glass. The bourbon was excellent, the exact brand she liked. But of course he would know that. He knew _her_ \-- better, perhaps, than she knew herself at the moment. "It seems to have affected my memories. I don't remember anything later than early 1946."

"But that means ..." Mrs. Jarvis trailed off, looking profoundly dismayed.

"I don't remember either of you," Peggy told her. "I don't remember moving to L.A. And I don't remember what I gave you to keep safe for me, Mr. Jarvis, which is why I want to see it."

"Yes, of course." Looking troubled, he hurried off.

"But you should have told us this morning!" Ana Jarvis exclaimed, and then her mouth rounded in an "O" as she worked through the implications on her own. "But you didn't know who we were. Oh, _no."_ And she began to laugh.

Peggy looked at her in surprise. "I wouldn't say it's funny."

"No ... of course not ... but ..." She wiped her eyes. "It's only, thinking about us turning up on your doorstep like that -- total strangers bringing you a basket of pastries! You must have been so shocked."

"I was, a little." Peggy smiled. It was hard not to be caught up in the woman's infectious friendliness.

Jarvis returned with a stiff manila envelope. "We're keeping it in Mr. Stark's safe," he told her, handing it to her.

Peggy set her whiskey glass aside and carefully extracted the contents of the envelope.

It turned out to contain photographs, dark and ill-exposed. She tilted them to the light, curious. They were photos of documents. From the slight fish-eye effect and blurriness around the edges, she guessed she had used some sort of small, secret camera; the SSR had no doubt continued the development of such things since the war.

"Do you know why these were important to me?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not. You wanted to use the darkroom here, and then asked me if I could keep them safe for you."

"Hmmm." She squinted at the photos, trying to discern what the documents were. Some were typed, others handwritten. They were spread out on a desk under a lamp. In some pictures she could see her own hand, holding a sheet of paper up to the light.

What had she intended these photos for? Evidence? If so, it was clear that she hadn't realized the documents would be so hard to read, taken in haste with the badly-focusing camera. However, she could read some of the closeups. Names, dates, places ...

"Oh!" She might not have recognized what she was looking at so quickly if she hadn't just seen a version of the same thing in her own desk drawers, but these were records of someone's movements. She was looking at surveillance reports.

_But who was I following? Someone at the SSR, surely, if I felt the need to hide these at Howard's place ..._

_No, Peggy, don't be absurd. You wouldn't be taking photos of your own surveillance reports._

The one she was looking at just now contained a record of several days in Washington D.C. There were notes of this person's visits to a couple of names she didn't know, and one she did. From noon to 4:20 p.m., the person under surveillance had been at General Chester Phillips' D.C. office.

_He's a general now? Apparently._

_And these are surveillance reports on ME._

"Miss Carter?" Mr. Jarvis said gently, and Peggy looked up, realizing she'd lost all track of time. Mrs. Jarvis had gone back into the house.

"You haven't told anyone else about these, I trust?" she asked him.

"No one at all. Not even Mr. Stark. If nothing else," he said with a wry smile, "my discretion can be counted upon, in this and all other matters. I was hired for it."

Plainly Peggy -- the other Peggy -- trusted him, or she wouldn't have left these with him. But she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him what was in the envelope. And she hadn't told Daniel and Jack at all, unless they were keeping it from her.

"When did I give you these?"

"Three days before your accident," Jarvis said.

And the most recent dates she'd been able to find in her own surveillance notes were five days old -- six days, now -- which placed it a day or two before the accident.

Which, it was clear to her now, had been no accident.

She flipped through the last of the photos, looking carefully for clues as to whose desk they were on. Unfortunately they had been taken in such closeup that the other contents of the desk were blurred or out of sight entirely. She was able to see the edge of what she was fairly sure was a cigar box, and made a mental note to look for something like that at the SSR.

Then, reluctantly, she put the photos back into the envelope. She would have loved to pore over them further, retracing her own steps during those days she couldn't remember, but that was an indulgence; the clues they held were not the clues she needed right now.

"Please continue to keep them safe for me," she said, handing the envelope back to him. "I can see that she, that is to say, the other me, trusted you a great deal. I will continue to rely on your discretion."

"Yes, of course." He took the envelope, turned it over in his hands, but didn't leave. "Miss Carter," he blurted out, as if he'd been working himself up to it. "This -- damage to your memory. Were you given any indication as to whether it might be ... permanent?"

"I'm afraid I don't know." She grasped after that brief memory of snow-covered trees and Dugan, but all she had now was the shadow of a memory, like a half-remembered dream.

"I see." He looked down at the envelope in his hands, some undefinable emotion skating across his face, and Peggy had a brief moment of profound horror -- _please tell me I wasn't sleeping with him too!_ \-- before he looked up, the emotion put away, and gave her a smile that was ever so slightly strained, but suffused with genuine warmth. "I will hope for the return of your memories, but if it is necessary to make your acquaintance again, Miss Carter .... then it is a pleasure to meet you again, for the first time."

That smile tugged on something in her heart, not a memory so much as a ghost of emotion, and she found herself smiling back without realizing she was going to. "Thank you. I look forward to getting to know you again."

She expected him to leave, but instead he continued to hover beside her chair, until she frowned at him. "Now what is it?"

"It's only ... since your memories of the last two years are gone, there is a matter I feel compelled to ... warn you about, I suppose, in the event that you have not discovered it already. The situation comes with a certain potential for awkwardness, you see, particularly for the unaware --"

"Mr. Jarvis, if you are trying to say something, kindly say it." _I did sleep with him, didn't I? Oh, Margaret Future Carter, you and I need to have strong words._

Jarvis fastened his eyes on a point above her head, flushing slightly. "This concerns your -- unorthodox arrangement with the two gentlemen from the SSR."

"Oh, _that,"_ she said in relief. "Yes, I know about that. Though, to be honest, I wasn't aware _you_ knew about that."

"I am fairly sure they don't know we know," Jarvis said. "In fact, I am not sure whether _you_ know we know."

"And by 'we,' I assume your wife knows as well."

His guilty look said it all.

"Please don't trouble yourself about it. From what I've seen so far," Peggy said tartly, "my future self has even less discretion about that relationship than one would guess from her decision to enter into it in the first place, so it's not as if you couldn't guess. I'm shocked half the SSR doesn't know by now."

Jarvis looked as if he was fighting to keep a straight face. "I take it you don't approve."

"What's there to approve of?" she all but wailed. She'd been holding it in, having no one to talk to who wasn't intimately involved in the situation themselves, but being able to vent about it was an unexpected, vast relief. "I'm living in a domestic situation with two men, neither of whom I'm married to! One of whom I despise, who considers me a contemptible joke of an agent, a glorified secretary. I cannot believe I've done this to myself. I must have gone mad."

"Or perhaps you fell in love," Jarvis suggested gently.

"With _Jack Thompson?"_ She'd been trying to tamp down her reaction around Daniel for fear of hurting his feelings, and also, for reasons she was trying not to examine too closely, because she didn't want to gratuitously hurt Jack. At least with Mr. Jarvis she could speak freely. He might be a stranger to her, but he was a sympathetic stranger who knew her secret and had already proven himself discreet. "Daniel at least I can understand; he's a good man, a kind man. Should I wake two years in the future and find myself married to Daniel, I might be surprised, but I wouldn't be shocked in the least. It's _rational._ But this -- _this_ \--"

Jarvis took a seat in the chair beside her, so that he was no longer having to look down to speak to her. "Love isn't rational, Miss Carter. You know what I did for Ana -- oh, well, I suppose you don't. Let's just say that bare weeks after meeting her, I found myself forging papers, stealing an airplane, and in essence committing treason."

Peggy refused to be placated. "Yes, well, I dare say you wouldn't have been stealing airplanes if Ana's first act upon meeting you was to mock your name, insult your aspirations, and deposit a stack of files on your desk, on top of _your_ files, because she couldn't be bothered to file them herself."

"I dare say perhaps not. And I admit that whatever it is that you see in Chief Thompson is lost on me. However ..." He reached out a hand, placing it not on her arm, but on the table between them. "Whatever it may be, you _do_ see it, and I can see that you do. Perhaps if your memories don't return, whatever has been between you will no longer be. But I wouldn't judge your future self so harshly just yet. When I first met you ..." He hesitated. "You were very much alone. You had been hurt greatly in the past, and had learned to hide your light because you were afraid others would steal it. Over the last two years, I have watched you blossom. I've watched you learn to let your light shine freely, and for those two men, it shines brightest of all. I can't see what you see, Miss Carter, but I do see _you,_ and none of the changes in you have been bad ones. At least from my perspective. So consider, if you will, that whatever made you happy once, may make you happy again. And now --" He seemed to come back to himself, cleared his throat and lifted the envelope. "I will restore this to Mr. Stark's safe."

He beat a hasty retreat, as if the emotional over-sharing had been a bit too much for him.

Peggy ran a fingertip around the outside edge of her whiskey glass.

_Whatever made you happy once, may make you happy again._

"But why?" she said aloud. "Why is _any_ of this happening?"

_If I've been given a second chance to make better decisions, shouldn't I take it?_


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which feelings are felt by various people.

Once they were alone in the car, the house receding behind them, Jack said, "We need to talk about what happens if she doesn't get her memories back."

Daniel glanced at him, then away. Typical Daniel Sousa, Jack thought angrily. Avoid the problem as long as you can, until it bites you in the ass. He'd have thought Daniel would've learned by now that ignoring unpleasant things didn't make them go away, but then, Jack knew better than anyone that people just didn't learn, sometimes: he was the reigning expert at making the same mistakes over and over. You could lead a horse to water but you couldn't make it think.

"I don't see why," Daniel said at last. "She will or she won't, there's nothing that talking is going to do except --"

Jack punched the dashboard. Daniel jumped, the car veering as his hands leaped on the steering wheel.

"Very mature," Daniel said once he had the car under control again.

"Oh, that's good, coming from someone who likes to ignore the monsters in the closet until they breed and have little monster babies. How far do you think we'll get, Sousa, if her memories never come back? You know things aren't just going to fall happily back into place, right? She can't even look at us."

Daniel's expressive face went instantly guilty, mirroring his thoughts as it always did.

"Or, I should say, me. She can't look at _me._ She seems to be warming up to _you_ just fine."

"Jack, come on." Daniel freed a hand from the steering wheel to lay it on Jack's leg. They hardly ever did that sort of thing in public, even in the car, which probably meant that Jack's face was displaying more of his emotions than he wanted right now, too. "For her, it's 1946. _Early_ 1946\. If she thinks about you at all, she thinks that you're -- well --"

"An enormous asshole? Yes, I _know._ You want to try cheering me up any more, I might need to step out of this car into traffic." But he could feel the corners of his mouth turning up a little, and Daniel was smiling slightly, too. The bastard had that effect on him; he always had, even back in the days when Daniel's verbal stabs were genuine.

"She is warming up to you too, you know," Daniel said. His hand was a light pressure on Jack's thigh, rubbing gently in slow circles. "You might not be able to see it, but I can. It's still _there,_ Jack. Everything she felt is still there. It's not gone."

Jack grunted.

"How's the wooing going?" Daniel asked, his voice playful. "Have you even bought her flowers yet? I always thought you were better at it than this."

"Sousa." Jack put his hand over Daniel's on his thigh, fingers curling gently around the square back of Daniel's hand. "You're a smart guy, so I want you to think this through, and consider Peggy's most likely reaction if I turn up on her doorstep with flowers. _Any_ version of Peggy."

"Ah. She'll think you're up to something."

 _"Right,"_ Jack said, vindicated.

"For cryin' out loud, you're just determined to put the worst possible spin on everything, aren't you?" Daniel demanded in tones of deep exasperation as he retrieved his hand for shifting gears, and parked in an alley behind a row of small suburban houses.

"If you can see a silver lining to this particular cloud, just go right ahead, Agent Pollyanna, but the rest of us down here on planet Earth -- mmph!"

He was not expecting Daniel to shut him up by leaning over and kissing him. It was very fast, but it derailed his train of thought utterly.

"We're in public for God's sake," Jack said between his teeth, glancing out the window. Walled in by privacy fences, they weren't in too much danger of being seen unless someone happened to look out the window at exactly the wrong time from the wrong angle, but it was still a lot more risk than they normally took.

"I know." Daniel looked around too, and when he'd scanned the alley for stray witnesses, he leaned across the space between the seats, tilted himself against Jack's shoulder, and turned his face into Jack's neck. Jack managed to keep himself hard-hearted against the mop of tousled brown hair on his shoulder for about the space of half a second.

"Damn it, Daniel," he sighed, cupping a hand around the back of Daniel's neck and pressing a kiss to the top of Daniel's head. "Where the hell are we, anyway? This isn't the agency."

"I know," Daniel said indistinctly against his neck. "It's Samberly's place. I wanted to check if he's made any progress on the mem-o-tron."

"On the what, now?"

"The memory doohickey." Daniel pulled back and gave Jack a speculative look. "Hey, come to think of it, you got zapped with it too, by Vernon. Back in the day."

"Thanks for the reminder." Daniel's hair, always resistant to being gelled into place, had come loose in a spill of touchable brown curls. Jack reached out to smooth them back into place, getting a disgruntled look from Daniel. "It sure didn't take two years of my memories, though."

"I know," Daniel said, batting his hands away, "but -- is it _gone,_ gone? Did you ever get any of it back?"

Jack started to say "no," but had to stop. He didn't like thinking about that time in his life. Didn't like thinking of most of his life, if it came to that; it wasn't a life well lived, and those last days before Vernon's death were very far from his favorite part of it.

But, when he thought about it, there was a tickle of memory there. It wasn't a complete blank. It was hard to tell the difference, now, between memories he'd manufactured and ones that were really there -- he knew _what_ had happened, what had to have happened, when he'd gone from Vernon's golden boy to traitor, and the nukes had gone missing. And somewhere in between was a no doubt deeply uncomfortable conversation with Vernon, and a betrayal (but who betrayed who first, really?), all of which seemed to be hovering somewhere just out of reach, like the way the right words could be almost there, on the tip of his silver tongue, but not quite near enough to grasp, not when it counted.

"... huh."

"It's not gone, is it?" Daniel sat forward, eyes bright. Jack hadn't actually realized how subdued _Daniel_ had become since Peggy's accident-that-wasn't, until seeing him now, eager and fascinated, looking like a bird dog on a scent trail. "There's something there, isn't there?"

"Down, boy." He tried not to let his heart lift in hope. He knew all too well how much worse it could be to have hope snatched away, than not to have it in the first place.

But Daniel's enthusiasm was annoyingly infectious, and as they walked around to the front of the house, Jack could feel a bit of a spring creeping back into his step.

At their knock, the door was opened by a woman who looked alarmingly like Samberly, with the addition of twenty-odd years and a flowered housedress. There was a cigarette in her hand and a belligerent look in her eyes. "Whatever you're selling, we ain't buying."

"Ma, knock it off. This is my boss, Ma." Samberly pushed past her. He was wearing a bathrobe and looked like he'd just tumbled out of bed. "Don't you ever sleep, Chief?"

"Came to see how things were going with the ... thing," Daniel said, trying not to make eye contact with Mrs. Samberly, who was glaring at him with the cigarette clenched between her teeth.

"It's been, what, six hours? I'm not a machine. I didn't promise instant results. Even a genius needs some down time for the brain to recharge."

"Samberly --" Daniel began, with the particular glint in his eye that meant he was fantasizing about picking up any nearby semi-soft object and whacking Samberly in the head with it.

"We'd love to hear about any progress you've made," Jack said quickly.

Samberly looked as if he thought it was a trap, but after a moment, he held the door wider. "Yeah ... well ... come in, Chief. Chiefs."

"And wipe your feet," Mrs. Samberly snapped.

The house looked like a tchotchke bomb had gone off in the living room. Porcelain figurines of baby-faced cherubs and cute, chubby animals were crowded onto every available surface, along with curios from every tourist attraction on this side of the Rockies: Las Vegas snow globes, Grand Canyon commemorative spoons, and so forth. Daniel seemed to be concentrating on crutching through it without tripping on anything. Samberly, muttering to himself, led the way to a side door that opened into what was probably once a spare bedroom, but now housed an indoor workshop. It was as crowded as the living room, but with wires and spare parts instead of large-eyed china moppets. Once they were all crammed inside, Samberly closed the door, shutting off their view of Mrs. Samberly unsubtly eavesdropping while pretending to dust some of the figurines.

In spite of the mess, Jack recognized the memory device immediately, lying on a workbench with its cables sprawled like the limbs of a dying jellyfish, and couldn't stop an instinctive flinch of revulsion.

"Okay, so." Samberly reached onto the shelf above it and took down a wad of wires, glass, and metal. "What I've done is, I knocked together a replica so I can do some experiments without risking damage to the only fully functional prototype we have."

"It's smaller than the other one," Daniel pointed out.

"That's because I've been testing it on Muffins."

"Muffins," Daniel said blankly.

"The cat. Nobody's going to notice a little brain damage in that cat, believe me. This would be going faster if she hadn't gone and disappeared on me, though ...."

Jack wasn't really a pet person, but he could sympathize with that particular cat. Daniel had the glazed look that meant he'd drifted off into further fantasies of shaking Samberly until actual information came out. "And what have you learned so far?" Jack asked.

"That trying to lure a cat out from under a sofa with a dish of milk really does not work, no matter what you see in the cartoon reel --"

"About the device," Daniel said in a strangled voice.

"Oh that. Not a whole lot, because, as I said earlier, it's only been six hours and I spent part of that time sleeping like a sane person." Samberly's face softened. "Look, Chief. I _like_ Agent Carter. I want to help her. Believe me, I'm going to do everything I can to get her back to her normal self. It's just that, there's only one of me, and I can only work so fast."

Daniel's head tipped to the side, his bright, sharp gaze running around the crowded workbenches and shelves. "Would this go faster if you had some help, and better facilities?"

Samberly gave a short laugh. "Well, _yes?"_

Jack guessed immediately where this was going, even before Daniel said, "Great! You can work at Stark's place. You've met Jarvis, right? He'll let you in. Just tell him I approved it."

"I -- yeah -- _Yes,_ Chief. Absolutely."

Daniel started to say something else, stopped, and looked more carefully at the scientist. Despite his look of enthusiasm, Samberly was visibly wilting with weariness. "But get some sleep first," Daniel went on. "You're right, nobody's going to solve this overnight, and it won't help if you're so tired you're making mistakes."

They left Samberly tinkering with the device and went back out to the car. "Stark would probably help, if he's in town," Jack said. "Guy's a flake, but he's smart, and he does like Peggy."

"I was the one telling Peggy this morning that she can trust the Jarvises. I guess I'd better put my money where my mouth is," Daniel sighed. "We can call 'em from the office later. Any of this starting to feel familiar to you, by the way?"

Jack snorted. "You mean sneaking around behind the SSR's back, working with Stark, and not being able to trust anyone? No, nothing familiar about that at all."

 

***

 

As soon as Peggy got home, she knew someone had been in the house in her absence.

It wasn't rational; it was more of an atavistic hindbrain thing, and it hit her as soon as she fumbled the unfamiliar-yet-familiar key out of its little pocket in her handbag and unlocked the door. Were those scratches on the doorplate new? She couldn't remember, but that was when the feeling first hit her, and it grew stronger as she opened the door and stepped inside.

Peggy reached into her handbag for the gun she'd already ascertained was tucked neatly inside.

Silent and stealthy, she swept the house. There was no one there. She lingered in the doorway of the home office. It would have been easier to tell if someone had searched the files if she hadn't just spent the morning pulling them all out and spreading them on every surface. Still, it seemed to her that the disarray was somewhat more disarrayed than it had been before.

It was possible that it was only paranoia. 

It was also possible that someone was trying to determine whether or not she'd been neutralized as a threat.

 _A threat to what and whom?_ she thought angrily. Her head was hurting again; the headaches had been intermittent since she woke up in hospital, usually not severe beyond the first one, but she hoped they'd go away soon. A side effect of the device, or just stress and lack of sleep? 

_You'd think three days in a coma would be enough sleep for anyone ..._

It also would have offered an opportunity for anyone who was truly gunning for her to get her out of the way permanently, she thought as she made herself a cup of tea -- after locking all the doors, and carefully examining the tea things for signs of tampering. Of course, it was possible that they hadn't had an opportunity. She got the impression she'd been hovered over rather thoroughly while she was in the hospital.

That made her think of Jack at her bedside when she woke up, the naked desperation on his face, the way it had relaxed into a playful, boyish smile as he'd realized that she was going to be okay -- before the truth of what had happened had dawned on them both, and he'd pulled away, becoming somewhat more the man she knew.

The man she had known in the past.

Time changed people. It had changed her. Jarvis, who had known her during these missing years, had noticed it. If she met herself today, would she even recognize herself?

She looked down at her hands curled around the tea mug -- more of a coffee mug, really, plain and blocky, not something she would have bought herself. Daniel's, most likely.

Falling in love with Daniel was an idea she didn't know how to handle. She could admit that to herself, if not to anyone else. She wasn't _ready._ Steve's death had left her in pieces, and now she felt like a broken cup that had been glued back together again. She might look okay on the outside, but she wasn't, not at all.

But she could imagine falling in love with Daniel. He was kind and sweet and gentle. Her broken heart would be safe in his hands. She could imagine his love salving those aching places. Steve's loss would never go away, her imagination was not big enough to conceive of a world in which she didn't miss him, but as Michael's death had taught her, even the deepest and most awful hurts could heal.

The idea of falling in love with Daniel made her stomach lurch, but it was the kind of stomach-dropping, exhilarated feeling as the first time she'd done a live parachute jump, clinging to the side of the plane, feeling the wind sting her face and rip at her hair. She feared the fall, but she also knew that when she did it, it would be worth it; the risk of disaster was a small price to pay for the closest thing to flying that any human being could experience.

But falling in love with Jack simply terrified her. She didn't know Daniel very well, but she could imagine trusting him with her heart. 

Jack, though -- it wasn't mere uncertainty, it was the absolute conviction that she _couldn't_ trust him. All the digs and dismissals and the petty insults -- what would it be like to let _that_ in? To let down the barricades that allowed the insults to slide off her (even though they still burned like brands, it was her skin that was burned, and nothing inside her); to allow him in, where his casual put-downs would be free to rip at the soft places inside her? She had seen what happened to women married to men like that, the way they became wilting shadows of their former selves, or else built walls of anger around their hearts that no one could penetrate.

Thinking about it brought a wave of protective anger for Daniel. She might not know him well enough to love him yet, but the love was there, waiting just below the surface, like water under a winter skin of ice. And she remembered how Jack had been with him when they had all three worked together at the New York office, so mocking and dismissive. She had seen enough of them together by now to know that Daniel loved Jack; the reasons were still opaque to her, but as Mr. Jarvis had said, love wasn't rational. There didn't have to be reasons. Daniel had willingly bared his naked self to Jack's claws, and she knew she couldn't stand by and watch Daniel be savaged.

_But there hasn't been a lot of savaging going on that you've seen, has there?_

Peggy let out a long breath, inhaled the steam of the tea, and looked out into the back garden as she sipped it slowly. Her eyes were unfocused, looking not at the slightly overgrown garden plots, but into the recent past.

Trying to treat her own life as she would a crime scene, to look past her surface preconceptions and see what was really there.

Because Jack _didn't_ have that dismissive playboy air about him anymore, did he? There was still something mocking in his eyes and his smile, still something about him that set her teeth on edge. But she could not remember a single time since she woke up that he'd been cruel to Daniel or to her, not a single time he'd made a joke about Daniel's gimp leg or spoken dismissively of her as a female agent.

How much _could_ a person change, anyway?

 _I'll ask Daniel to tell me how it happened,_ she resolved. That question, at least, should be easy to answer: what it was exactly that had changed things between her and Jack, between Jack and Daniel, between all three of them. She had been so focused on solving the _other_ mystery, the question of what had happened to her memories, that she had been overlooking the one that the people around her actually had the answers to.

All she had to do was ask, if she could find enough room in her heart to accept the answers.

 

***

 

Daniel was not expecting to be met by a very wary and alert Peggy, hiding behind the door with her gun in hand.

"Ah, it's you," she said briskly, upon realizing that it was him and Jack, and stepped aside to let them in.

"... did something happen?" Daniel asked warily as she returned her gun to her purse.

He saw her hesitation, momentary though it was, as she contemplated whether or not to tell him, and tried to suppress the sharp twinge as if someone had pulled a piece of fishing line through his heart. "I think someone may have been in the house today," she said.

"Man, no kidding," Jack said, his eyebrows going up as he surveyed the living room. It had been reasonably neat when they'd left earlier; now papers were strewn everywhere. "They wrecked the place."

Peggy folded her arms. "That was _me,"_ she snapped, the implied _you imbecile_ hanging in the air between them.

"What happened?" Daniel asked quickly, noticing that Jack's shoulders had tensed at her tone. The last thing they needed was for those two to erupt into open warfare. "Were you here at the time?"

"No, I had to ... run an errand." Her voice was even, smoothing quickly over the brief pause. "I have no direct evidence, only the indirect kind. The lock on the door looks as if it's been picked, and I believe the papers in the office have been moved around. I'm aware neither of you have any cause to believe me --"

"Except for the fact that it's you, and you don't have a habit of needless paranoia?" Daniel asked, pre-emptively smoothing over the top of whatever Jack might have been about to say.

Jack, however, was bending down to look at the doorframe. "She's got a point," he said, running a thumb over the scarred wood. "Someone forced this lock, not badly enough to break it, but unless it was like this before -- was it, Sousa?"

"Not that I ever noticed," Daniel said. He was suddenly and profoundly glad that he'd made sure Samberly got the mem-o-whatever out of the SSR. "Did they take anything?"

"I can't tell," Peggy said, sounding frustrated. "I wouldn't know anyway."

Daniel closed and locked the door, testing the action of the locks. The deadbolt, which they were not normally in the habit of locking, seemed to work fine; the doorknob lock was stickier than he remembered, as if it had been forced. 

"Should call a locksmith," Jack murmured. 

"I'll put it on the to-do list," Daniel sighed. Peggy, he noticed, was rubbing her temple as if her head was hurting her again. "Peggy, have you eaten?"

"Oh." She glanced up at the clock. "I didn't notice the time."

"Pizza it is then," Jack said. "Or the best facsimile this beknighted city can offer up."

"Someone needs to go grocery shopping," Daniel said. "We're out of almost everything. There's just been too much else going on."

"And is likely to be for the near future," Jack pointed out. He held out a hand. "Keys?"

Daniel tossed them over. "Don't forget to turn off the hand switch for the clutch."

"I know how to drive your car, Sousa. It's not like I've never done it before. And I could use the drive to clear my head." He was out the door before Daniel could decide whether to suggest that Peggy come along -- or that _he_ should come along -- but then Jack was gone, plainly avoiding Peggy along with the entire issue.

_And he accused ME of not dealing with things._

"Was he with you all day?" Peggy asked, shuffling files into a neat stack.

"Jack's not your enemy, Peg. I can promise you that. Anyway, he has a key. He wouldn't have to break in even if he wanted to."

"True," she conceded. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something more, then closed it.

"Did you find something else?"

Peggy made a noncommittal noise.

"Yeah. That's your 'I did find something and I don't want to tell you' face." It would never cease to amaze him how a woman who was that good at undercover work could also be such a catastrophically bad liar.

"Daniel, I can't tell you everything, because you tell everything to Jack. I can only be fully honest with you if you promise me that you won't tell him."

Daniel heaved a sigh, feeling his shoulders slump. And he'd thought mediating between them had been exhausting _before._ Now it was like trying to negotiate an armistice. "I can't do that. He's on our side, Peggy. I don't know how to convince you of that."

"Well," she said brightly, "that leads directly into something I wanted to talk to you about anyway."

"Oh good. I think I'm going to need a drink for this. You want something?"

Peggy hesitated, then shook her head, with another slight wince.

"Head's hurting again?"

"It's only a mild headache. Don't look at me like that."

"You should go in tomorrow and talk to the docs." Daniel poured himself a couple fingers of whiskey from a mostly empty bottle.

"If it worsens," Peggy conceded, stacking more files to clear a space on the table. "In any case, I was hoping that you'd enlighten me about the ... hmmm ... the foundations of our relationship, I suppose I'd say. I can't believe I haven't asked this, but how did this _happen?"_

Daniel stared at her, then knocked back most of the glass of whiskey and poured himself some more.

"Well, that's encouraging."

"Listen, I don't know how to explain it to you. I hardly know how to explain it to myself."

"You're really not doing a good job of convincing me that my other self didn't make a terrible mistake," she remarked.

"I wish you'd stop talking about yourself as if you were a whole different person four days ago. That was _you_ , Peggy."

"No, it wasn't. _I_ have a healthy mistrust of Jack Thompson, cultivated for entirely legitimate reasons, I might add. I have a job at the New York SSR. I lost my boyfr -- My -- my _Steve_ less than a year ago --" Her voice cracked on this part. "-- and am most assuredly not ready for a relationship, particularly one of this sort. And none of those things is true of her!"

Daniel couldn't help being glad that Jack wasn't here for this. Dealing with Peggy in crisis was bad enough; trying to navigate the rough waters between the two of them at the same time would have been borderline impossible. He also guessed that her head must be hurting badly, if she was being this open about it. "Peg -- come here, sit down --"

He took her in hand as gently as possible, trying to keep his touches light and professional, just a polite gentleman guiding a distressed lady to sit on the couch. She went readily, responding to him with unconscious physical trust that he recognized mainly because he knew how physically prickly she could be if she _didn't_ want to be touched. It was another sign that the Peggy they knew was in there somewhere, informing the subconscious reactions of this Peggy in ways that even she didn't seem to be aware of.

It would help if she wasn't fighting so hard to hold that other Peggy down. (And, God, now he was doing it too, thinking of modern-day Peggy as a different person from the Peggy of two years ago.) He could understand why she was doing it, because it was so _her._ Peggy would absolutely hate having her thoughts and feelings only partly under her control, and she was going to struggle to assert that control in any way possible, even if it meant doubling down on all her opinions of two years ago.

Such as "Jack Thompson is an irredeemable wanker."

 _God,_ he thought, retrieving a glass of water and bottle of aspirin from the kitchen before sitting down across from her. _Jack's right. What ARE we going to do if her memories don't come back?_ Because it wasn't as if Margaret Elizabeth Carter was ever going to get _less_ stubborn.

"Here. Take these."

Peggy looked exasperated, which at least was better than how distressed she'd looked a few minutes ago, and swallowed two aspirin with a large gulp of water.

"Are your headaches getting worse?"

"Not really," she said, massaging her temples. "It was at its worst by far the first day. Now it simply comes and goes. It's not enough to interfere with my daily activities."

"Squinting at papers all day couldn't have been good for it."

She offered him a thin smile.

"But seriously, Peggy, getting back to your earlier question, I really can't give you a clear answer, because I don't entirely understand it myself. I can tell you that you and I were already skirting around ... something ..." He moved a hand suggestively back and forth between the two of them. "And then Jack got shot, and that seemed to, I don't know, push-start something with the three of us. You and I were practically living in the hospital, with Jack, and ..." He trailed off, lost for a moment in the memory of those weeks, when day blurred into night and the delirious happiness he'd anticipated when Peggy's lips met his had instead turned into worry and desperation and the dawning, startled realization that it would have ripped his heart out of his chest if the asshole had had the nerve to up and die on them.

"Is that when we ..." She swallowed. "Got together?"

"No, that came later. Months later. But I think that was the turning point. If he'd gotten on that plane, gone back to New York like he was planning before he got shot, I don't think anything would have happened between us."

"All right, so that's the 'how.' I can accept that. But it still doesn't answer the _why._ I've seen a lot of people shot, Daniel, people I liked and people I didn't, and on no occasion did it give me the urge to leap into bed with them. Particularly under such very peculiar circumstances."

Daniel blew out his cheeks, trying to figure out how to describe _any_ aspect of Jack and Peggy's relationship to her, especially since he hardly understood it himself. Back in those early days they'd been a whirlwind that he could barely follow, fighting like cats and dogs one minute, then suddenly and inexplicably making up. He couldn't even keep up with the twists and turns when he was living through it, let alone find a way to describe it in words.

"I don't know," he said helplessly. "It just happened. The closest I can think to something that might have kicked the whole thing into motion was the time the two of you went to Belarus together."

"What happened then?" Peggy asked.

"I don't know. I wish I did, actually. It was an SSR mission -- you had to go retrieve some information from a Soviet installation. You two left hating each other like usual, and came back ... not. I never knew what went on between you. Maybe it was the first part of ... what's happening with all of us here. You'll have to ask Jack about it."

Peggy sighed, and gave him a ghost of her usual smile. "I'll do that, I suppose. And us ... what about us?"

"Us?" was all he could think of to say.

"Yes, us." The smile was a little brighter now. "If you can't explain me and Jack, can you explain me and you? How we happened?"

"Us ... it was ... I guess we just worked together for awhile, and got to know each other. There wasn't a sudden moment with us, more like a slow realization, and then we just ..." He hesitated. The way she was looking at him now, curious and interested, made him think of Peggy a year ago, before they'd taken the plunge ... but not that long before.

All those feelings were still inside her. He really believed that.

"What happened?" she asked quietly, her gaze intent on his face.

"We just ..." He couldn't take his eyes off her. "We'd won a big case. We were both excited, and we were -- not fighting exactly, just pushing each other a little, the way we always did. And you -- you leaned forward --"

He remembered -- would never forget -- the way her eyes had changed at that moment, the way something had _clicked,_ just before she'd lunged at him. And he saw something now, a small sparking flash of that click, as she leaned across the coffee table, and he leaned forward, too, drawn as if by magnetism toward her.

"Like this?" she breathed.

Her lips opened under his. Warm and soft, tasting of Peggy -- gentle and slow, not like their urgency the first time --

The sound of a key rattling in the lock made them spring apart. Peggy's hand darted into her purse, lying beside her on the couch, and then moved away again, as Jack came in with a large brown paper bag. 

He gave them both a long look, while they both tried to settle into normal-looking positions on their respective pieces of furniture. "Don't tell me you two had a fight now."

And then Daniel saw, with a stomach-sinking train-wreck feeling, Jack's eyes go from confused to knowing -- saw his gaze go to Daniel's lips, where the incriminating lipstick stains would be. Saw the darkening of Jack's expression, the anger and hurt starting to cloud his eyes.

 _You were the one who left!_ Daniel wanted to say, feeling his cheeks heat. He was angry too, all of a sudden. He was tired of tiptoeing around, trying not to upset someone. Tired of pretending he didn't have the feelings he had for both of them.

"Peggy asked me how our relationship got started," he said at last, and took his hand down when he realized he was surreptitiously wiping at his lips. "Us -- the three of us, I mean."

Jack gave a bark of bleak laughter. "Did you tell her about the part where she tried to kill me, or the part where I tried to kill everybody?"

"Wait, what?" Peggy said.

" _Not_ helping," Daniel snapped. "I told her about the part where you got shot."

"How about the part where I blackmailed her? Tell her that." Jack went into the kitchen with the bag, but as he did so he pulled a whiskey bottle out of the top of it, and Daniel glimpsed that it wasn't entirely full. Jack had started drinking it in the car.

So apparently Jack going out to clear his head hadn't worked. Daniel clenched his teeth so hard his jaws hurt. Sometimes it was like trying to deal with a couple of emotionally impaired toddlers ... with guns.

Of course, he and Peggy hadn't helped anything. If only Jack hadn't come in at that exact moment ...

Peggy followed Jack into the kitchen with her eyes, until he was lost to view. "He blackmailed me?"

"It's complicated," Daniel said weakly, and shouted after Jack, "Thanks for nothing!"

Jack came out of the kitchen with the bottle and a glass. Noting the half-empty glass that Daniel had left on the sideboard, he topped it off and held it out, in the general direction of both of them. Peggy was the one who took it. Jack tipped some into the clean glass, put it in Daniel's hand, and then flopped on an armchair with the bottle. He swung a leg up over the arm of the chair.

"So is there food or isn't there?" Daniel said between his teeth. It wasn't just the abortive kiss causing this. After their conversation in the car, while he'd thought things were reasonably resolved, Jack must have been brooding all day. He wished it was easier to tell when that was going on. Sometimes he could recognize the signs, but sometimes everything seemed reasonably normal until one of Jack's bleak moods surfaced with a whiplash shock, and apparently this was one of those times.

"In the kitchen." Jack took a swig from the bottle. "I figured we'd better get the awkward conversation out of the way first."

"Daniel and I were having a _private_ conversation," Peggy said tightly. "Which you left us alone to have."

"Yeah." He held up the bottle, looking at it rather than them. "Whole lot of talking going on, I could tell."

"I _told_ you what we were doing," Daniel said, finding himself on the defensive. "We were working backwards, trying to explain the points where our ... reality, I guess you'd say, changed from what Peggy remembers, to what's happening with us now. Jack, please _look_ at me."

Jack raised his sardonic gaze from the bottle to the two of them. "Happy?"

"No," Daniel said miserably, and this made something in Jack's gaze soften.

Peggy of course picked that moment to say, in a clear carrying voice, "Daniel told me something happened between us in Belarus. What was it?"

Jack froze with the bottle halfway to his lips. "Belarus?"

"Yeah," Daniel said, since apparently they were having _this_ conversation now, "that time with Leviathan, back in 1946."

"I know which trip you're talking about, Sousa. I don't hop over behind the Iron Curtain every week, you know."

His voice was low and dark, and Daniel was starting to regret ever bringing it up with Peggy, but it was too late now. She was staring at Jack, a tiny furrow between her brows, as if she herself could almost see how the puzzle pieces went together -- but not quite.

"What'd you tell her?" Jack went on, in that same low, strange voice.

Daniel swallowed. _This was a mistake._ He'd wondered for two years what had happened between them on that mission, and now he found himself desperately wanting not to know. "I ... well ... that you two went off to Russia hating each others' guts and came back ... not."

"You want to know what happened, Sousa? Carter?"

"I do," Peggy said, still with that searching look.

Jack gave a particularly unhappy laugh and took a drink from the bottle. "We got shot at. Comrades under fire and all that. Peggy's especially good with an M1, as it turns out. And Li got killed. You remember _that,_ right, Sousa?" His tone was nasty, spoiling for a fight. Peggy's small, puzzled frown deepened, as if that wasn't the answer she was expecting.

"It was a legitimate question, that's all," Daniel said quietly. " _Something_ happened over there to make the two of you stop going at each other all the time. Of course it's going to come up."

"If I wanted you to know, Sousa," Jack said in a voice that was cold and dangerous, "I would have told you. All right?"

He swung his leg off the chair, got up, and marched into the kitchen. From the slam of the kitchen door, he'd gone into the backyard.

Peggy stared after him, then looked at Daniel, her eyes troubled. "Is this what living with him is like?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Some of the time." Daniel rubbed his hand across his face. "I shouldn't have brought up Belarus. That was something private with the two of you, I don't know what or why, but I should have let _him_ get to it in his own time. And I shouldn't have --"

The quick touch of her hand on his arm, light as the brush of a bird's wing, drew his eyes to her. "Daniel," she said. " _You_ did nothing. I was the one who asked the questions. I was the one who kissed you, because I wanted to. No one has the right to make either of us feel guilty about it, least of all Jack Thompson."

In one sense she was right; in the other sense she wasn't, but there was nothing he could say to convince her otherwise. More than anything else, he wanted to ask her if kissing him again was something she might want to do, but at this exact moment, it felt like a betrayal of Jack to even bring it up.

So he said nothing. Peggy's hand left his arm, to his regret. She hummed quietly to herself and took a drink from her glass of whiskey, and then she said, "I believe there was a mention of food."

The paper bag on the kitchen table turned out to contain fried chicken wrapped in paper and a fresh loaf of bread. Daniel put the chicken out onto mismatched plates, and then looked out the window into the backyard, and left the plates on the table. "Excuse me for a minute."

He went onto the back porch, closed the door behind him, and stood leaning against the post at the corner of the porch. Jack had retreated to the far edge of the fenced backyard, outside the pool of light cast by the window, and was nursing the bottle of whiskey in a sullen silence while perched on the edge of a pile of old timbers for some long-abandoned yard project by the house's previous owner.

"Are you going to come inside and eat with us, or sit out here and sulk while drinking yourself into a coma?"

Jack raised the bottle in a kind of salute.

"Oh, for God's sake," Daniel said. He was hungry and frustrated and too tired to deal with this. Resentfully, he limped down the porch steps and picked his way through the scraggly grass to where Jack was sitting. Jack moved over to make room; Daniel sat down beside him, and refused the bottle when it was offered. An alarming amount of the contents had vanished.

"I'm sorry," Daniel said quietly.

Jack groaned and ground the heel of his hand against his eyes. "Don't. Don't apologize to me, okay? Not for ... any of that, but especially not for doing what just comes naturally when you're dealing with a girl you've been in love with for two years."

"I shouldn't have let it happen like that."

"Knowing Peggy, I doubt if you had any say in the matter." Jack offered the bottle again. This time, with a small sigh, Daniel accepted it and took a swig. It burned all the way down.

"You know, if we both keep doing this on an empty stomach, Peggy's going to have to pour us into bed."

Jack shrugged. "At least she won't be under any illusions about what she's getting herself into."

"No, of course not, how could she be, with you out to show her the worst of yourself at every possible opportunity."

He was worried that it was too rough, all things considered, but Jack only gave a snorted laugh and took the bottle back. "Worked the first time, didn't it?"

"Oh, come on, Jack. She didn't fall in love with you because of you being an ass to her."

Jack took a drink from the bottle. Grimaced. "It's as good an explanation as any, isn't it?"

Daniel wasn't sure if he'd ever heard a human voice sound so bleak.

"Jack --" he began.

The back door opened and light spilled out across the grass. Peggy came down the steps, one careful step at a time, carrying three plates balanced between her two hands.

"Bit dark out here," she remarked as she neared them. She offloaded one plate into Daniel's hands, the other into Jack's, and pulled over a rickety lawn chair to sit on. This, too, had come with the house, legacy of the previous owner. 

"That's got a broken leg," Daniel pointed out, remembering just in time that she didn't know. "Be careful. We usually prop it against the fence." On the incredibly rare occasions when they used it.

"Oh," she said quietly, and edged the chair against the fence slats.

Jack's body had tensed as if in preparation for taking his pity party indoors. Daniel hooked the ankle of his good leg around Jack's, effectively trapping him -- at least if Jack didn't want to wrestle to escape. He glared at Jack as if he could penetrate that thick skull with the power of his mind alone: _She is HERE, you dink; she came out to SPEND TIME WITH YOU, so please try to pretend for one moment that you are a functional human being and not either flee from her or chase her away again._

Jack glared back at him, then looked away and put the whiskey bottle down so he could use his hands to break the chicken apart. Well, that was a step in the right direction.

 

***

 

In the soft, lambent light at the edge of the yard, Jack found that his eyes were drawn, time and again, to Peggy's face. The world was spinning softly, the half a bottle or so of bourbon that he'd mainlined on an empty stomach going straight to his head, but _she_ didn't seem to move, a fixed point in the swaying, unsteady world. 

But of course, if she didn't want to move, Peggy couldn't be budged.

She was beautiful as always, her face half in light and half in shadow, with Daniel between them -- a sort of buffer, intentional or not, between their mutual volatility. Daniel often ended up playing that role, something Jack was not unaware of, and he was suddenly sorry about that. Sorry for making things worse tonight, when he knew this wasn't easy for any of them. 

It was strange to watch Peggy eating with her hands. He hadn't really thought, when he'd picked up dinner for them, that fried chicken was one of the more undignified foods one could eat. It was just that the options were rather limited in the vicinity of Daniel's neighborhood, and he hadn't felt like going farther afield.

Now he watched her relaxing, ever so slightly; watched her smile at something Daniel had said. Her face wasn't expressive in the same way as Daniel's, Daniel who wore every emotion reflected in his eyes, but she was ... _Sincere,_ he thought. That was the word for Peggy. Her thoughts and feelings might be veiled -- especially now, especially around him -- but that only made her more intriguing. It made him think of learning to do depth sounding during the war, mapping harbors and shallow straits to find out what was beneath the water. Some of the old guys, the ones with riverboat captains in their family line and piloting in their blood, had an almost preternatural ability to navigate their way through treacherous channels, lousy with reefs and mines and the hulks of sunken ships, by reading the subtle clues on the water's ruffled surface.

The ocean didn't lie; it only concealed. 

And Peggy was still Peggy.

She had always fascinated him. Even back in the early days, at the SSR, he'd found himself intrigued by her. She didn't succumb to his casual flirting, but she didn't reject him either, at least not outright, which had made him all the more intrigued; her tongue had the edge of a lash, but when he'd fired a verbal shot across her bow, she had fired back, and though it was clear she disliked him, she had never taken the trouble to run him off completely. Some girls took offense at him easily. Others failed to understand his jokes. Peggy fell into neither category. He might make her angry -- he'd done that a lot -- but he'd never chased her off.

 _Woo her,_ Daniel had said.

But Peggy's heart was not won with flowers and chocolates, he knew that much. It would have been so much easier if she'd been silly and shallow, her head easily turned by sparkly things, like the girls he'd flirted with back in New York and all throughout his callow, misspent youth. If he could have bought her a shiny bracelet and seen her eyes melt, he would have done it ...

... would he? His stomach twisted in revulsion at the thought. He didn't want to buy Peggy's love. And besides, if her love could be bought, she wouldn't be the woman he knew.

"Jack," Peggy said, and he was startled out of his thoughts by the sound of his name on her lips. She was leaning past Daniel, her eyes on him with an intensity that made him realize, in a sudden instant of alcohol-fueled clarity, that she was sounding him out, too. Her smile was tentative but genuine as she asked, "What do you think of L.A.? Do you like it here? From what I've seen so far, it's very different from New York."

For an instant he was back in Belarus, Peggy asking him over the campfire, _"I hear they have mermaids in Japan. Did you see any of those when you were over there?"_ in almost exactly the same tone.

Feeling him out. 

And extending an olive branch, too, in her own way.

It made him wonder how much she actually did remember. He'd almost sensed a challenge when she'd asked him about it earlier; it was one reason why he'd walked out. For a bitter instant, he had wondered if she was faking, and her amnesia wasn't nearly as complete as she made believe it was.

But no, that wasn't the kind of game Peggy would play.

"He hates it," Daniel said, grinning.

"She asked _me,"_ Jack shot back, poking him in the arm with two stiffened fingers. Daniel's mock wounded look was made considerably less convincing by the humor dancing in his eyes. "For the record," Jack went on, "this is a miserable sun-infested wasteland and I can't imagine why anyone lives here voluntarily."

"And they put avocado on everything," Peggy said, and then looked startled, as if she didn't know where those words had come from.

"You actually _like_ avocados," Jack said. "For some reason."

"Oh," she said softly.

"At least you used to." And damn it, some part of that was the wrong thing to say -- again. After that brief moment of openness, her walls had gone up again.

He really could read her, though. It was something of a relief to find out that he still could. He hadn't realized how well he'd come to know her until he had to guess at everything -- and he still wasn't _good_ at it (Vernon would say -- Jack could almost hear him -- "Who can ever understand what a woman is thinking?") but he didn't really think her brain operated differently from a man's, in any specific way; it was just that she had a particular Peggy-ish way of thinking, and he'd known her long enough and well enough to be able to get a read on it, most of the time.

 _At least when you stop getting in your own way,_ he told himself, _and pay attention to what she's telling you, even when she doesn't say anything._

It was like a light clicking on. Maybe that was why Daniel was so goddamn good at it: because he didn't invest a lot of energy and effort in worrying about _himself._ He just paid attention to what was going on around him.

In the sudden silence that had fallen, Daniel cast a quick, worried glance between them, then stacked their plates with the stripped chicken bones and skin. He got up, carrying the plates carefully one-handed.

"Hey --!" Jack said, but Daniel was already headed for the house, leaving them alone.

Peggy started to get up, but then, before Jack could get his alcohol-slowed thoughts (and his courage) together enough to ask her not to, she stopped, and settled carefully back into her rickety lawn chair. 

For a moment they just looked at each other in the soft shadows on the edge of the pool of light cast by the kitchen lamp. Through the window Daniel could be seen, moving around, scraping plates, and occasionally glancing out into the garden.

"Dreadfully subtle," Peggy said after a moment, with the faintest ghost of a smile.

"Sousa wouldn't know subtle if it bit him on his prosthetic leg," Jack said fondly, and then in the interests of honesty, he amended it to, "At least most of the time."

"He's a good man, Daniel," she said softly.

"Yes. He is." This, at least, they could both agree on.

She'd once told Jack that he was a good man, too. He still wasn't sure if he believed her, but the thought occurred to him that this version of Peggy probably didn't think so. And that hurt, more than he had expected it to.

"Jack ..." Peggy said, and he looked up. "You and Daniel are ... together. Correct?"

"Yes," he said. Long-ingrained habit made him say it quietly, although he hadn't heard or seen anything to make him think anyone was in the yards abutting theirs.

She gave a slight nod. She'd just needed to hear it, he thought, and he reached for the whiskey bottle again.

Peggy held out a hand.

Jack took a slow sip from the bottle, watching her, seeing her watching him -- her eyes on his lips, on his throat as he swallowed. Then he passed it to her.

She took a mouthful, held it for a moment, and swallowed. Then she handed it back. There was a trace of lipstick on the mouth of the bottle.

If he'd been a little braver, he could have used that. Flirted. Run his tongue around the rim of the bottle's mouth. He could see himself doing that -- in some other world, where he wasn't a fucking coward.

Instead he drank -- thinking, as he did, that this might be about as close as he'd come to having those lips on his again.

Through the window, Daniel was now watching both of them with a frown.

"It's like having a chaperone," Jack murmured, giving the bottle back to her.

Peggy grinned as she took it, and that made his heart lift, his stomach flip over with something other than unease.

He'd made her smile.

"What do you think of L.A.?" he asked, on a whim.

She stopped with the bottle halfway to her lips. Lowering it, she looked at him, and her eyes were veiled again. "You know that already," she said. "Surely you do."

Damn it. "No I don't," he said, pushing through the internal resistance, past the voice (a little like Vernon, a little like his father) telling him to shut up before he damaged his chances with her even more. They might know women, but he knew _Peggy._ "Tell me."

"Jack ..." Her voice was a low groan. "I don't _know._ I can't remem --"

"Really? Because I've never known Peggy Carter not to have an opinion about something. C'mon, I know you've only seen the house and the SSR so far, and that's not much to judge from, but you asked me earlier, so it's only fair. What do _you_ think?"

Her look was startled and long, as if she'd never seen him before. It shouldn't hurt; of course she didn't know him, _or_ Daniel. And he had to keep reminding himself of that.

"I ..." She seemed to be tasting the words. "It's very ... bright. A bit startling, to go from winter in New York, to this."

That's right, if she only remembered up to early 1946, the last thing she remembered was the gray chill and unending bite of a New York winter. "Yeah, I hear that. It's always weird getting on a plane in New York, with gloves and numb fingers and the works, and then getting off here, with the palm trees and short sleeves and all."

He'd meant to commiserate, but he got that sinking feeling, for just an instant, that he'd done the wrong thing again: pushed her away without meaning to, in this case by reminding her that he'd been flying west, over and over, during the years she didn't remember. 

But this time it didn't seem to have that effect; instead the bright red bow of her mouth curled in a slight smile. "You know," she said. "I keep wondering where my gloves have gone. I'm sure I did something sensible with them, before I left New York. I must have. But somehow it feels as if I've lost them."

"I keep leaving mine _here._ You'll probably find six pairs if you look around."

"Oh," she said, "is that what the gloves in the office drawer were all about."

"If they were gray suede driving gloves, I've been looking all over for those."

This got a full smile, a quick flash of dimples. She sipped from the bottle and passed it back.

"So I'll tell you," Jack said, accepting the greatly lightened bottle, "as one L.A. transplant to another, you're gonna want to drink a lot of water. It's drier here than you think. And -- let's see, what else do I wish people had warned me about? Nobody in this town knows how to make a decent pizza. Never go out to the desert without a darn good road map, because it's confusing as hell out there. And starlets really don't like to be asked for their autograph when they're just having a regular lunch with their beau in a public restaurant."

"Words to live by." She took the bottle back from him and drained it, then set it between her feet, and for a moment they just looked at each other, calm and quiet in the dark.

She was so goddamn beautiful, long lashes casting shadows across her cheek. But it wasn't the physical that compelled him, so much as what he'd come to know about her over the last two years. Her resilience, her spark, her willingness to forgive him all his sins.

If he met her fresh now, would he see _her,_ or only see the lipstick and brown curls? _I wouldn't behave any better than you've been,_ he thought in her direction. _You know I wouldn't._

Peggy stood up suddenly, an abrupt blurring movement in a world that was tilting with his drunkenness and fatigue. He looked up at her as she extended a hand down to him, stared at the red-painted fingernails, the graceful curve of her hand.

Peggy wiggled her fingers at him. "Come on, do you plan to stay out here all night?"

He reached up and took it. This was the first time, he thought dazedly as she helped him up, that they'd touched -- really touched -- since the reality of her situation had become apparent to all of them.

And, in his current state of lowered inhibitions, it brought a rush of memory stirred by the heat of her skin: Peggy naked, with the peach-and-cream tones of her skin contrasting with her dark hair and nipples that were almost as dark; Peggy, reaching up for him, with Daniel curled along her shoulder, lips pressed against her neck ...

She released his hand as soon as he was on his feet, and he felt, just for a moment, bereft.

But she looked happy, even if she wasn't quite smiling, as she walked him to the house.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which interesting discoveries are made, but not precisely as Peggy might have wanted.

Peggy was up before either of the men -- not surprising, she thought, given how they'd been drinking last night, Jack especially. For her own part, for a change, her head didn't hurt, as it had off and on since she'd lost her memories. 

In the dawn stillness of the house, she went through the SHIELD paperwork again and again, as if she could rebuild her previous life by reading dry words on paper until they sank in and became part of her.

But her life couldn't be found between the lines of these pages, she thought as she sat on the floor with files in her lap and looked up at the early-morning sunlight creeping across the wall. Her life was in this house, in the men that she had decided -- against all sense or reason -- to live with; in the Jarvises too, those people who so clearly worried about her and were willing to trust her on nothing except her word.

That kind of trust had to be earned. Whoever she used to be, whatever the flaws of that other Peggy, she had inspired loyalty in the Jarvises, and in two men who even now were trying to win her back.

She leaned back against the wall. A cup of tea sat cooling at her side.

If she didn't get her memories back, she was going to have to rebuild her life. The idea of simply starting over was a powerful siren call. She could make things better than before. She could look dispassionately across two years of her other self's decisions with the crystal clarity of hindsight unclouded by emotion. She could pick and choose which things were mistakes, which things could be kept ...

But gut instinct said that would be the wrong thing to do.

Because emotion was a necessary part of decision-making, wasn't it? She could already feel herself beginning to get tangled up with Daniel again, and intrigued by the puzzle that was Jack, in only two days. She could not accept that her other self had been entirely a fool, or too clouded by unthinking lust to be rational. Her other self had had _reasons_ for making those decisions.

_Consider that whatever made you happy once, may make you happy again._

The sound of doors opening and closing downstairs, along with soft voices and the sound of quiet male laughter, drew her out of her reverie. Daniel and Jack were up. Peggy rose and quietly left the room. She found herself avoiding certain parts of the floor that she knew creaked, without knowing how she knew. She went to the top of the stairs and looked down.

They were out of the bedroom in the living room, unaware that she was awake and watching them. Jack was stripped to the waist and barefoot, wearing nothing but a pair of pajama bottoms, and Daniel -- who actually _was_ dressed, at least partly, in trousers and shoes and, so she assumed, his artificial leg, but wearing only a sleeveless undershirt on top -- had his arms around Jack's waist from behind, chin resting on his shoulder. They were talking quietly. She saw Jack grin, saw him twist his head around and kiss the corner of Daniel's mouth, and Daniel tipped his head into the hollow between Jack's head and shoulder.

They hadn't been doing anything like that in front of her, and the difference struck her down to the core of her being. They didn't want to shock her, she thought. Even with her, they'd been playing at being ordinary colleagues and co-workers, putting on the same show for her as they must for everyone else at the SSR.

But this was who they really were. This must be something the other Peggy had seen often. Had been part of. She couldn't tear her eyes away; it felt as if she'd never seen them before, but was seeing them now at last -- Daniel leaning into Jack's back, his eyes closed; Jack with one of his hands covering Daniel's at his waist, thumb running lightly back and forth across Daniel's knuckles. 

Jack tipped his head back against Daniel's and closed his eyes, the line between his brows smoothing out as he breathed out slowly.

Peggy retreated as quickly and quietly as she could to the office. She busied herself there, moving stacks of papers absently around, until she heard a door downstairs close with a solid clunk. Water began running in the bathroom.

She didn't want to consider whether it was that she didn't want to invade their privacy, or if it was her own heart she wanted to protect; she couldn't bear the way the tenderness between them plucked at something inside her.

She ventured cautiously out of the office again. There were no more voices downstairs, but she heard a car door slam outside, and went swiftly to the front window in the guest bedroom, from which she could see Daniel's green car pulling away from the curb.

_Now where are you off to?_

Water was still running downstairs. She padded quietly down the stairs and went into the kitchen. Her hands had already gone through the motions of making a pot of coffee before she realized what she was doing, and she stopped in the act of putting the can of ground coffee away in the cabinet where it normally was kept. The percolator was heating up on the stove.

 _She_ didn't drink coffee.

But they did.

And she'd made it for them often enough that her hands knew how, even if her head didn't.

She was standing with her hands clenched on the edge of the sink, head bowed, when soft, quick, damnably familiar footsteps came into the kitchen. "Morning, Peggy," Jack said.

She looked over her shoulder at him. He didn't look hung over; he'd shaved, combed his hair neatly, and was tucking a crisply pressed shirt into his trousers, the straps of his braces slung over his arm. He looked exactly as he always did at the office: ready to suck up to Dooley and probably find some petty typing-pool work for her to do.

There was still a part of her that clenched inwardly at the sight of him, especially seeing him like this, looking just like the golden boy of the New York SSR. Except ... he _wasn't_ quite the same -- a little older, a little more tired around the eyes, a little softer in the face. And it was easier for her to see all of those things now.

"Where did Daniel go?" she asked. The words sounded accusing when they came out, and it made her wince inwardly. It was so _hard_ to let her guard down around him.

The warm light of welcome that had kindled in his eyes at the sight of her developed a more guarded edge. "Work," Jack said, clipping his braces into place.

"Not you?"

He shrugged. "Sousa's got a whole department to run. So do I, but it's all the way across the country. I can do what I need to do just as easily from here as I can from Sousa's office."

Suspicion made her eyes narrow. "Or possibly you two are conspiring to keep a guard on me."

"Or possibly that," Jack said easily. He moved past her -- swift, graceful, not quite touching her -- to check on the coffee.

"I'm capable of defending myself, you know."

Jack gave a sharp bark of laughter. "Trust me, we all know. Call it a sop to our male egos, if you like." He opened the refrigerator door and studied the contents. "No milk. No eggs. Exactly one slice of bread and one leftover pancake. Guess someone gets to take a trip to the store before we can eat."

Peggy reached out to turn off the gas flame under the percolator. "Or we could get breakfast somewhere. There must be a good diner in the area."

"What, just you and me?" His look was wary and slightly disbelieving.

"Why not?" It sounded rather more challenging than she meant it, but for some reason that made him smile. "Someplace we can talk, if possible. I'd like to tell you something ... about what happened to me."

The look he was giving her now was familiar in the same way as watching Jack and Daniel from the top of the stairs had been familiar -- it was nothing she'd ever seen on his face before, but it was a look she knew anyway, intrigued and sharp and curious. "Sure," he said. "I know a place."

 

***

 

The place where Jack took her reminded Peggy slightly of the automat where she usually got her meals near the SSR -- or, no, that was back in New York, two years ago. Was it even still open? It felt as if she'd only been there yesterday. She released that thought and let it go back to the past where it belonged.

Jack escorted her to a booth in the corner with gentlemanly tact, one hand not quite touching her elbow. Most of the other patrons were up at the counter. "Just you and me, huh?" he said after the waitress had stopped by to take their orders.

"Don't get ahead of yourself. I would have invited Daniel too. I want both of you to know this. We'll just have to fill him in later."

Quietly, holding nothing back, she told him about the notes she'd found on her private investigation, and the folder of photographs at Howard's. Jack listened without saying anything, calm and slightly distant. It was easier, somehow, to say this to him rather than to Daniel. She would have feared hurting Daniel, and she didn't have the same fear with Jack. For one thing, this was something she thought Jack would understand.

"I would like to say that I don't know why I didn't tell either of you -- why I didn't tell Daniel, at least -- but it would be a lie." She looked down at her hands, holding the heavy diner mug of tea as it cooled in her hand. "I woke to a world that was unfamiliar to me. Everything I used to know was wrong. Even the people with familiar names and faces were strangers. I stumbled upon evidence that the other me, the Peggy with all her memories, felt that she had an enemy in the SSR and ..."

"You couldn't know that it wasn't me," Jack said. His voice was calmly professional, but there was something a little ragged underneath, and she looked up quickly. He _was_ hurt. That was a surprise. It wasn't something she'd expected to see there, and for a moment she was derailed, her certainties coming undone.

"I'm telling you now," she pointed out. It was all she had. "I know, now, that it's not."

He tilted his head to the side. "What makes you so sure?" A quick, wry twist of his mouth, and something in his voice that she could recognize as affection. "Because we got drunk together last night?"

" _I_ wasn't drunk," she felt compelled to point out. "And it's not that, not quite. Jack, it's true that I don't know you the way that the other Peggy does. But I don't think I'm a bad judge of character, and no matter the differences we've had, I think when I'm able to step back and look at the situation rationally, I can't see you working against the interests of the SSR or one of its agents. You are a lot of things, but ..." A soft laugh escaped her, at least partly because of the way he was looking at her: a very strange look, one that she couldn't read at all. "You aren't a traitor. You aren't a mole. Whatever else you've been, you've always been a good agent. And a traitor is what I have concluded _she_ was looking for."

She wasn't quite sure what made Jack take a deep breath, like he was gulping air, but whatever was there on his face -- something strange and sharp and painful to look at -- vanished in an instant when the waitress arrived with two plates and a pot of fresh coffee balanced in her expert hands.

"So I'm going to guess," Jack said once the waitress was gone, cutting up his sliced ham without looking at her, "that you think this lead Sousa's chasing is related to whatever your, uh, 'other Peggy' was looking into."

"If my memories were erased deliberately, it's a rather shocking coincidence, don't you think? Someone tried to get me out of the way. I'd wager it was either the person conducting surveillance on me, or someone connected to them."

Jack darted a quick look at her. "Think they knew about your connection to ... us? Me and Sousa?"

"Oh," she murmured. That thought hadn't occurred to her -- possibly because the situation with Jack and Daniel still had a certain unreality about it. "I don't know. There was nothing in the folder at Howard's that specifically pertained to it. I gather it was more my activities at the SSR that were under surveillance, rather than my personal ones. But if there's one thing I've learned about my other self, she's much less discreet than she thinks she is."

Jack was taking a drink of coffee; he choked on it.

"Is something funny?"

"No, no, it's just ..." He shook his head. "It's strange looking at this from the other side, you know?"

"Other side of what?"

"Ah. Right. You don't remember."

"Jack, I swear, I am one more vague statement from flinging this piece of toast at your head."

"Ha. Peggy, it's just that, speaking as your boss, I have spent a lot of time trying to stay one step ahead of you while you go running off doing whatever happens to pop into your head at any given moment. Whoever's trying to keep tabs on you has my heartfelt sympathies."

He was smiling, but his words had given her something else to think about. "That's right, you are my boss, aren't you?"

"Among other things," he said under his breath, busying himself with his breakfast in what she suspected was a calculated attempt not to meet her eyes.

Peggy had lost most of her appetite, having found a brand new unpleasant angle on the whole situation. The sting of the assumptions the other agents in the office made about her relationship with Steve and consequent career advancement was still so fresh it burned. Was it possible she'd given up on denials and decided to be the person they all thought she was? No ... that hurt too much to bear. Anyway, it was hard to imagine herself becoming _that_ calculating and jaded in just two years.

Hard to believe, too, that Daniel would look at her the way he did, with that soft light of affection in his eyes, if she'd become that kind of person. She didn't believe Daniel would put his heart in the hands of the ruthless social climber she feared for a moment she'd become.

She couldn't trust herself anymore, but she trusted Daniel's opinion of her. 

She trusted him. And he trusted Jack ...

"Jack," she said slowly, "do you have anything specific to do this morning, other than keep an eye on me?"

The look he gave her was characteristically suspicious. "Got something in mind?"

"Because I'd like to go back to Howard's and look at those surveillance photos again. With you."

Now an element of wary hope crept into his face; it was almost painful to look at. "Why?"

"You remember things I don't. You may recognize details that I overlooked. I ..." She clenched her teeth and pushed the words out, past her pride. "I think trying to conduct this investigation on my own was -- unwise." She couldn't quite say _a mistake._ Not to Jack Thompson. It appeared that her other self had a habit of working on her own -- the fact that she'd concealed her investigation from both Daniel and Jack was evidence enough of that -- but her other self also hadn't given Peggy much faith in her logical-thinking capabilities. Peggy would have preferred Daniel, but he wasn't available. Jack was. "I've been trying to draw conclusions based on information I simply don't have. But you do. Perhaps you'll see something that you'll recognize, something that might tip you off to who's doing this."

Jack balled up his napkin and dropped it on the table. "I'm in. Let's go."

 

***

 

They arrived at Howard's just in time to meet Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis on their way out. By now Peggy was braced to be greeted with a hug from Mrs. Jarvis; she was faintly relieved (and even managed not to stiffen up, much) when she got a squeeze on the arm instead.

"Chief Thompson," Mr. Jarvis said in greeting to Jack.

"Jarvis." Jack nodded to the large case Jarvis was carrying. "What's in there?"

"As Mr. Stark is not currently in residence and his lab facilities here are shuttered, Dr. Samberly is at Mr. Stark's Malibu facility with Dr. Wilkes. Ana and I are driving out to bring some requested materials."

"And who is Dr. Samberly again?" Peggy asked, turning to look at Jack.

"Ah, so, I'll just let you two work this out, won't I? Dear -- I was thinking we'd take the Cadillac with the top that rolls down --" and Jarvis hustled his wife past the two of them.

"Samberly's working on the memory-device thing," Jack said. "Sousa thought it'd go faster if he had Stark's facilities to work with -- where are you going?"

"To get the combination to the safe before they leave!" Peggy shot over her shoulder, scrambling out the door.

She caught up with them in the mansion's car park, getting briefly distracted by the number of gleaming, brand-new automobiles parked in it before hailing them. Jarvis scribbled the combination on a slip of paper and handed it to her. "I'm pleased to see you've decided to enlist some help, Miss Carter. Possibly not the individual who would be _my_ personal choice of assistant, but --"

"Don't listen to him, Miss Carter," Mrs. Jarvis interrupted, reaching across to give her husband's hand a friendly squeeze. "He's only put out that you didn't ask _him,_ but he will get over it."

"I certainly am not 'put out' in any way!"

"Ask him to do what?" Peggy asked, baffled.

"To investigate," Mrs. Jarvis said.

"We have shared more than a few adventures, Miss Carter, you and I," Jarvis explained gently. "But you will remember all of that when your memory returns. Which we both hope it will." He patted the case. "Thanks in large part to this, so I must be off. I wish you the best of success in your endeavors."

Peggy stared after the Cadillac as it pulled out of the drive. What sort of _adventures_ had she been having with Howard's butler, exactly?

At least she wasn't sleeping with him.

That she knew about.

She went back into the house, and a brief search ensued before she and Jack managed to find the safe in Howard's master bedroom. Peggy worked the combination lock while an enormous portrait of Howard watched them with a smile that Peggy found vaguely eerie, although very Howard.

"Have you noticed he has portraits of himself in every room?" Jack murmured.

"It is rather difficult not to notice." The safe clicked open and she extracted the envelope. Going through its contents under the portrait of Howard was simply too distracting, and spending too much time in Howard's bedroom was disturbing all on its own, so she took it into the kitchen and shook the photos out onto the table.

Jack whistled, flipping through them. "You weren't kidding. Someone's been putting a lot of work into this."

"Do you know whose desk that is?" Peggy asked, leaning over his shoulder. She couldn't help being momentarily distracted, this close up, by the light blond fuzz on his cheek and the scent of his aftershave. 

"I'm not sure. Daniel might know. There's not much to go on. I can tell you it's at the West Coast SSR and not my division." He pointed to one of the wider-angle shots. "We don't use that kind of desk lamp. That's all Sousa going through the lowest bidder."

The urge to defend Daniel rose in her throat, but subsided on the memory of that private moment she'd glimpsed at the bottom of the stairs. She was still thinking of Jack two years ago, of the cut-downs and the jokes.

But two years really did change people, sometimes.

It had changed her into someone she hardly recognized. Maybe it had changed Jack, too.

She was still so close to him, closer than she'd ever wanted to get in that other life -- _her_ life, except it _wasn't_ her life, and sometimes it seemed as if she looked back on the New York SSR of 1946 with her hand pressed to a pane of glass, as distant from it as everyone around her kept telling her she ought to be. She was a different person here. The world itself was different, and the familiar-not-familiar scent of Jack's aftershave, the golden sunlight glazing his hair, made her reckless.

"Do you love us?" she asked.

The words came out in a rush, falling into the lull in their conversation. Jack jerked his head up, looking wide-eyed and shocked.

"What?"

"Daniel and me." She'd thought so much about this from her own perspective, trying to understand what _she_ was getting out of their relationship. But she'd never turned it around and tried to understand it from Jack's. As he'd said at the house, his job was on another coast. His life was in New York. And yet he was here. With them.

"I ..." He stared at her, and she wasn't sure if it was pure intuition, or a fragment of emotional memory recovered from that other Peggy who still lurked somewhere in her head, but she had the sudden feeling that this was _important._ That, no matter what he said next, something had to change.

However, after a long moment, he broke their stare and turned to look toward the back of the property. "Did you hear something?"

She started to ask what, but didn't have to. The distant sound of shattering glass answered for her, and with it, a mechanical voice echoing through the house in Jarvis's crisp tones: "Warning. You are not authorized to access this area. Warning --"

And memory hit her like a sudden jolt of electricity. Sensations more than anything else, the tightening of a cord around her neck and the cool rush of water closing over her head. Here -- that had happened here. She'd been attacked here. She almost had it, for an instant, the memory elusive as sand slipping through her fingers --

"Peggy!" Jack snapped, and she came back to herself, startled and afraid. She'd frozen. She _never_ froze.

She raised her hand to touch her throat, felt the brush of her fingers across intact, unbruised skin. Her headache was back, like pincers closing on her temples.

"Peggy!" Jack said again. He was reaching for her arm, but she stepped away and reached for her bag and the gun she carried in it.

The alarm was still going, such as it was: "Warning. You are not authorized --" 

"I really hope Howard has more security than _that,"_ Peggy muttered. Her heart was still racing, a combination of the remembered adrenaline rush and the fact that, if Jack hadn't been there, she had no idea how long she would have stood in a helpless fugue state, trying to recapture that lost memory. The pounding of her pulse was a painful tattoo beating against her headache. She checked the load in her weapon to give her something to do with her hands.

"Don't ask me." Jack took two long steps to the tall picture windows looking out on the back garden and yanked the curtains shut after a swift glance outside. "What do you think we're dealing with? Try to fight? Make a run for the car?"

One-handed, she scooped the photos back into the envelope and stuffed it in her bag. "We may have a chance to get answers at last."

"Or get ourselves shot, if we're outnumbered." He'd taken up a bodyguard stance, flanking her.

"We should call Daniel," she decided. "If we can hold out until the SSR gets here --" There was a phone on an end table, and Peggy snatched up the receiver, only to frown at the dead silence on the line. She tapped the cradle vigorously with the knuckles of her gun hand, to no result. "The line's been cut."

"This isn't a simple home invasion. Peggy, we gotta get out of here."

Reluctant prudence won over her burning need to know, and she nodded. Letting Jack take the rear, she hurried down the passage toward the front door, only to recoil in shock and dismay as the door burst open with a splintering crash. She glimpsed someone outside, a dark figure in the blinding sunlight, just as something bounced through the opening and Jack yelled, "Peggy, look out!"

He dove one way, she the other. She had taken it for a grenade at first, as Jack probably had too, but it was already beginning to spew smoke. Gas, she thought. She held her breath as the billowing cloud swept across her, making her eyes sting and burn. Somewhere in the gas-filled hallway, she heard Jack coughing.

There was nothing she could do for him if she got taken. She fled into what turned out to be a bedroom, slamming the door and shutting out most of the smoke. Her eyes were watering freely and her nostrils burned. 

The room had a large picture window looking out on brilliant green shrubbery. Sending a silent apology to Howard -- though it wasn't as if he couldn't afford to replace it -- she kicked the glass out, then wrapped the drape around her free hand to break away the pieces still clinging to the frame and make a hole she could escape through.

She did hope they hadn't killed Jack. If there was one thing he was good at, though, it was taking care of himself.

The mechanical voice had stopped. Hopefully Howard's home defense system included some automated means of summoning the authorities -- and with further luck, it hadn't been disconnected when the phone lines were cut. For now, though, she was on her own. Gun in hand, Peggy scrambled out onto a walkway wrapping around the side of the house. 

Front or back? She wished she had a better idea of the layout of the place. She had a feeling that if she relaxed and let it come back to her, she'd be able to find her way around in the same automatic way she could find her way around Daniel's house, but that was easier said than done when aggressive men with gas grenades were pursuing her.

And one of them had just come around the end of the walkway, moving furtively. She glimpsed a weapon and swung her gun in his direction. He saw her and ducked back around the corner with a yell of, "She's back here!"

Damn it. She was boxed in by the wall of the house and a tall hedge. The hedge provided less resistance, so she forced her way through it and stumbled out the other side, scratched and bleeding, onto a wide lawn. The day was perfectly calm and sunny, deceptive weather for such events. It seemed that it should have been dark or at least raining.

Instead, under the blazing California sun, she fled across the lawn. She was fairly sure that the stucco wall ahead was the back of the garage for the Stark motor pool, which meant if she could get around the end and find a way in -- and if the vehicles hadn't been disabled -- she might be able to make a getaway.

Leaving Jack in the hands of their attackers ...

But there was nothing she could do for him if she got caught too.

Assuming he was still alive. And that thought made her stomach wrench, a sudden hard jolt as if she'd taken a step down and found empty air where she had thought to find solid ground.

Something sped past her shoulder with a faint burring sound and plunked into the lawn. It had a red end cap. Tranquilizer dart, she thought. They were trying to bring her in without hurting her. Well, that was better than being shot -- at least in the short term.

She rounded the end of the garage and her feet went flying out from under her as something rammed into her stomach. She went down hard, rolling as she fell, her body reacting automatically in a move she didn't even know she'd been taught. She ended up on hands and knees, and looked up through watering eyes, panting for air. The man looking down at her had clubbed her in the stomach with the butt of his rifle, and now he reversed it to its right orientation, pointing it at her.

Wheezing for breath, she pulled her wits together enough to lash out at his legs. He managed to dodge aside, and his point-blank shot went wide, another tranq dart burying itself in the pebbled path. Before she could recover enough to strike again, something heavy and hard landed on her shoulders, driving her flat to the ground.

She wasn't completely knocked out, but she was stunned enough that she was only vaguely aware of her hands being hauled behind her back and cuffed. A second set of cuffs were slapped on her ankles. _Standard SSR issue,_ she thought vaguely. It seemed that thugs should be using ropes.

She was thrown onto the lawn, and rolled over weakly, the cuffs digging into her wrists. Three men were standing around her, two with rifles pointed at her, the third unarmed. Not a single one of them looked familiar, but at the moment that didn't mean anything.

"I figured your reputation was exaggerated," the unarmed gentleman said. He was middle-aged with thinning hair and a tall, storklike build. When he crouched down on the lawn to reach for her handbag, the storkish impression was even stronger. She wished she had the slightest clue who he was. 

"Let's see what's in here." He pawed through the contents and found the envelope. "Ah, _finally,"_ he muttered, pulling out a few of the photographs. "I knew you were faking. You remember a lot more than you're letting on. You might have the rest of them fooled, but I guess it was too much to hope for."

Wonderful; it was looking more and more as if he _was_ at the SSR, which meant the Peggy she was supposed to be would know who he was. Except ... Jack and Daniel had been keeping most of the SSR in the dark about her condition, hadn't they? Maybe he didn't know about her amnesia at all. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she tried. "What have you done with my companion?"

"Someone gag her," Storklike Fellow said. "She's a slick talker, so let's let her do her talking somewhere that isn't here. You know, I _tried_ to do this the easy way, Carter."

The odds that he was the person who had caused her memory loss were going up, but she wasn't able to deal with that; she was too busy having a handkerchief shoved into her mouth and bound in place with someone's tie. One of Stork Fellow's accomplices brought a sack that looked like it used to contain flour, which was shoved over her head.

In choking, floury darkness, she was led stumbling across crunching pebbles and then clattering asphalt, the handcuffs around her ankles rattling with every move she made. Her ribs and abdomen still ached from having been struck. She tried an experimental shout through the gag, but managed only a dry, muffled grunt. This prompted someone to smack her hard in the head, and things became rather hazy for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've bumped the number of chapters up from 8 to 9, because I split this mega-long chapter in half. YOU'RE WELCOME. XD


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which more than one interrogation takes place.

Peggy came back to herself with a vague sense of nausea and movement. The floor was swaying underneath her. Some kind of vehicle. That was bad. Not that any of this was _good,_ exactly. And the bag was still over her head, so she couldn't see anything. Her nose was half clogged from the flour and what she'd inhaled of the gas, and for a panicked moment or two, she was primarily concerned with trying to breathe.

Something bumped into her. Peggy let out a yelp, muffled by the gag. A hand touched her arm, squeezed lightly, then moved away. She was aware of someone shifting position next to her (Jack? she thought) and then the bag was pulled roughly away, and there was light.

Dim light, anyway. She was looking up at the ceiling of what was probably some kind of truck or van. Still struggling to breathe, she forced herself to sit up on the general principle that it would be easier if she wasn't lying down. She still felt as if she was going to choke. She wanted the gag off _now,_ but with her hands cuffed behind her, she wasn't going to be able to get it off by herself.

There was nothing else in the back of the truck except a couple of discarded flour sacks and, to her mingled dismay and relief, Jack. He was sitting up against the side of the truck, also gagged and cuffed. His hair was an utter mess and his face was dusted liberally with flour, as hers probably was too. The bag that had been over her head was still clutched in his fist.

There was a brief exchange of increasingly frantic pantomime in which she tried to mime getting the gag off, and he tried to mime something that turned out to be lying down on the floor of the truck, which he finally got across by ramming her with his shoulder and knocking her over. Lying next to her, he rolled over and worked on the gag with his cuffed hands until it came loose. She spit out the ball of handkerchief and coughed. Finally, blessedly, she could _breathe._ After that, she did the same for Jack, and they both leaned against opposite walls of the truck bed and coughed for a little while.

"Thought I was gonna choke," was Jack's comment at last. His voice sounded hoarse, and when Peggy looked up at him, she saw that his eyes were reddened and there was an ugly-looking bruise purpling his cheekbone. It looked like he'd gotten more of the gas than she had.

"Me too," she admitted. "Blasted amateur kidnappers. They'd be in a fine mess if they let us choke to death in the back of their truck."

"I don't know if they care about that so much, now that we've seen them. Pretty sure it's not in their best interests to let us go."

"Is that a general statement, or do you know who they are?"

"They're SSR," Jack said.

"Oh. I was afraid of that. You know them, then? I hope they aren't any of Daniel's people. Or yours," she added with hastily applied tact.

"They're all Washington bureau except for Wescott. He's one of the lab boys in Sousa's division, or at least he's supposed to be, but he seems to be able to handle himself in the field just fine, from the look of things."

"Wescott is the tall one?"

"Yeah." He gave her a hopeful look. "Memory coming back at all?"

"I'm afraid not. Nothing except for ..." She hesitated. "I don't imagine any rogue agents at the SSR have strangled me recently?"

"Say what, now?"

"Never mind. It was only a thought."

"Mmmm." He studied her, but when she decided not to elaborate, shook his head and looked away, examining the creaking walls of their mobile prison. There was still flour lightly dusting his eyebrows and lashes. "Any thoughts on getting out of this truck?"

"Do you have lock picks on you?"

He shook his head. "Afraid not. You?"

"Not that I'm aware of." For all she knew, she could have a lock pick hidden in the heel of her shoe or in her belt buckle, but not even having the first clue where to begin looking, she didn't fancy searching herself with her hands tied. "Do you have any guesses about where they're taking us?"

Jack shook his head, causing a light cloud of flour to rise in his general vicinity. "We've been driving for about half an hour, I'd guess. Enough time to get to a lot of different places."

Peggy lurched to her feet, leaning against the wall, and shuffled over to examine the rear doors of the truck. Another unexpected surge of memory caught her off guard: she'd been in a truck not unlike this one and -- she'd -- she'd -- no, it was gone again, leaving nothing but a faint vestige of emotions (worry, triumph) and a renewed spike of pain at her temples.

She was shaking a little, and leaned against the side of the truck under the pretext of studying the door. Her memories were there, and they were getting stronger. She had thought she'd have a choice about whether to resume this Peggy's life or not, but it was starting to look as if the choice wasn't going to be hers after all.

And she was terrified. 

She'd faced down Axis soldiers, she'd jumped out of planes over occupied countries, she'd lived for years under the daily threat of torture and death -- and nothing she could remember had ever scared her like the idea of having her mind overwritten with two years' worth of experiences that another Peggy had lived. She was faced with having her entire self wiped away and replaced with an incomprehensibly alien version of herself: a Peggy who felt things she didn't, who believed things she didn't, who loved people she didn't --

"Peggy?"

She flinched violently. Between the rattling of the truck and her own distraction, she hadn't been aware of Jack getting up. Now he was leaning against the wall just behind her, close enough that he could have reached out and touched her if his hands hadn't been cuffed behind his back.

"You okay?" he asked.

"What makes you say that?" It came out sharp-edged.

"You keep zoning out. That's not you."

"I'm thinking about how to escape," she said tightly. "I recommend you do the same."

He started to say something, but the truck jolted violently under their feet, nearly throwing them both to the floor. As more potholes shook the vehicle's frame, they half-sat, half-fell to avoid falling flat on their faces. The engine had shifted to a lower gear, growling as the truck labored along a road much rougher than the one they'd been driving on.

_Of course, any decisions about my future are contingent upon the assumption that we're going to live through the next couple of hours ..._

"Daniel's sharp," Jack murmured. "He'll figure this out."

Peggy gave him a curious look. "Jack Thompson, putting his faith in someone else?"

Rather than ducking the comment, he gave her a level look. "You're the one who taught me to do that."

Before she could answer, the truck jolted to a halt and the engine died. In the sudden silence, Peggy could hear male voices, the slamming of car doors, the sound of footsteps crunching on gravel.

Jack nodded toward the flour sacks and gags crumpled on the floor of the truck. "Put those back on?" he murmured.

"I don't think there's time. Besides, I want to see where we are."

There was a loud clunk as the truck's rear door was unbolted from the outside.

"Try to take 'em?" The words were so soft her lips barely moved.

"May as well," Jack murmured wearily back, lurching to his feet.

The door opened, and dusty sunlight spilled into the interior of the truck.

They both came out fighting. Peggy threw herself onto the door-opener. They both went to the ground -- he gave a tremendous "Ooof!" as the breath was knocked out of him, and she headbutted him to try to keep him down. She heard cursing and thumps from nearby, and a loud clang as someone was slammed into the side of the truck, but wasn't able to spare any attention to find out how things were going with Jack.

She rolled off the man she'd attacked and started to heave herself to her feet, when rough hands grabbed the chain connecting her cuffs and slammed her to the ground, yanking her cuffs painfully. She managed to connect with someone's legs by lashing out with both feet -- she felt a jarring shock and heard a yelp of pain -- but a hand seized her hair and slammed her face into the ground. That hurt abominably, as did the following kicks to her sides and shoulders. She was forced to roll into a ball to protect herself.

She heard a furious shout from Jack, followed by a crunch and then no more shouting. That seemed like a bad sign.

Possibly this escape attempt had been ill-advised.

Curled up and hurting, she was dragged across the ground into someplace dark and cool, and dumped on a concrete floor. 

"Get up," said a voice she now recognized as the voice of the storklike guy, Wescott. "I know you're not hurt that bad. Get up, Carter, or --" There was the sound of a gun being cocked. "We'll shoot the Chief."

Peggy's eyes snapped open. Her eyelids were sticky, the lashes sticking together; her face was bleeding. Someone was holding her by the chain on her cuffs, and now they hauled on it, pulling her up to her knees by her abused wrists.

"If you're going to kill us anyway, does it matter?" she demanded, trying not to sway in place while she took a quick look around.

She'd been expecting to see a warehouse, from the echoing size of the place, but actually it looked more like the inside of an airplane hangar. Some of the upper windows were broken, letting in dust-studded shafts of afternoon sunlight. There was a plane parked near them with its engine partly torn down and a crumpled canvas dust cover pulled partly over it.

_Abandoned facility from the war,_ she thought. They'd been driven out into the desert. There were a lot of buildings out here that had been mothballed when the war effort ended.

Jack was a few yards away from her, flat on the floor with one of Wescott's henchmen pressing a foot into his back and pointing a gun at his head. His face was turned toward her, eyes screwed half shut. He'd picked up a new smear of blood on his mouth, and some of his hair was matted and darkened, the blood glistening wet and fresh. However, he looked both conscious and furious.

Besides Wescott, there were five guys around them. Peggy's heart sank. There must have been at least one other car in their convoy. They hadn't had a chance.

"Talk, Carter," Wescott ordered. He upended the by-now-familiar envelope and her photographs fluttered to the ground. "What else is there? What do you know?"

Her mind spun furiously. She could play this one of two ways. He'd obviously tried to remove her nonviolently at first, by wiping her memory. She could try to make him believe it had worked. Or she could bluff, make him think she knew more than she did ...

Given the options, she figured the "playing dumb" option was least likely to get them both shot in the next few minutes. After all, it was basically true. She really _didn't_ know anything, or at least she hadn't before Wescott had tipped his hand.

"First you can tell me who _you_ are and why you've brought me here," she snapped.

"You don't know me?"

"I don't know anyone!" It wasn't hard to put a hint of a wail into her voice, to allow her angry facade to crumble a bit. All she had to do was remember the dislocation and uncertainty of waking up in a place she didn't remember, missing two years of her life. "Whatever you want me for, whatever you think I did, it is very likely I don't remember it."

"She's telling the truth," Jack ground out. "There was a lab screw-up. She lost her memory. We've been trying to hide the extent of it at work -- ugh!" He broke off with a cry as the foot resting on his back bore down harder.

"What do you remember?" Wescott asked, looking down at Peggy.

She sat back on her heels, looked him in the eyes, and poured all the false sincerity she could muster into her face and voice. "Very little, to be honest. I know my name. I know I work for the SSR, because I've been told so. I remember flashes of my childhood sometimes. I seem to know how to use a gun and how to fight, but it's automatic, something I don't have much control over. I don't remember where or how I learned it."

"Huh." Wescott nudged the photos with his toe. "What about these?"

"I don't know what they are. I just learned of them today. I had been storing them at a friend's house -- my friend had no idea what they were either," she added quickly, not wanting to direct Wescott's attention to the Jarvises. "And then you attacked me." Would crying be too much? It would probably work better if he didn't know her, and she had no idea how well Wescott did know her, or how much he'd worked with her. She wished she'd thought to ask Jack while they had a chance to talk privately. "Whatever you want me for, I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help."

Wescott turned away abruptly, rubbing his thumb across his lower lip. Then he spun back around and pointed to the agent guarding Jack. "Hurt him. We'll see if she's lying."

Peggy sucked in her breath.

Jack bucked his body, attempting to fling them off. It didn't work: two of the agents held him while a third worked him over. Peggy averted her eyes, looking at Wescott instead, and trying to ignore the meaty thud of fists on flesh, and Jack's involuntary gasps and grunts of pain. He was mostly quiet, however.

It was ironic, she thought. She hadn't worked at the SSR very long -- that she remembered -- but she had been there long enough to have seen Jack in action. She knew what went on in Dooley's interrogation room.

There had been times when she had thought it was all Jack deserved, and more, to be on the receiving end of someone like himself for a change.

_But what do they want?_ she thought, to distract herself, staring at Wescott's tie rather than his face, and trying to close her ears and her heart to every blow that struck home. Clearly these men were corrupt agents of some sort. She must have been investigating it. Or they'd been investigating her. It just went around and around in circles. She simply didn't have enough information. She wished she had the ability to talk to her other self without actually _becoming_ that person.

"Well, this isn't working, is it?" Wescott said briskly. "Enough." The sounds stopped. Peggy risked a peek. Jack's head was hanging down, his shirt front splattered with blood. His chest heaved as he breathed in quick, shallow gasps.

Wescott crouched in front of her and reached out to take hold of her chin, turning her face toward him. She was still being held from behind, pinned in place by her cuffed hands. She considered headbutting him, but her forehead still hurt from the last time. The idea was very tempting, though.

"Either you don't remember a thing, or you don't give a damn if we beat your boss until he ruptures something. Or both." He smiled slightly. "You're a very cold woman, aren't you, Carter? Do you feel anything for anyone?"

"Not for you," Peggy said softly. "I don't remember what you did, but I expect you deserved whatever I was planning to do to you, before I lost my memories."

Wescott shook his head and stood up. "This is a waste of time. Bring them."

Peggy was hauled to her feet, and Jack was half-carried, half-dragged, although after the first few steps Peggy noticed that he managed to get his feet under him and was able to stumble along. She couldn't tell if he was faking being worse off than he was really was.

They were hauled out of the hangar into the eye-searing brilliance of the afternoon sunshine. Peggy got a quick look around at more war-era buildings, their paint already peeling and faded to a washed-out tan by the harsh sun, before they stopped in front of a bunker door set into the side of a low, probably man-made hill. It was standing open, revealing that the bunker inside was not very large, about the size of the living room of Daniel's house. It was all concrete, floor and walls and ceiling.

As they were forced inside, Jack seemed to wake up suddenly, raising his head. His battered face made Peggy wince before she managed to cover her reaction. "So is this a prelude to dumping our bodies in the desert, or what?" he demanded, his words slurred by his swollen lips. "What exactly are you keeping us around _for?"_

"I'm not planning to kill you. Why should I?" Wescott sounded almost cheerful. "You aren't going to remember any of this."

Jack blanched. He'd already been pale; now he went paler yet. "You're going to wipe our memories."

"If it worked on her, it'll work on you, and if it worked on her once, it ought to work again." Wescott smiled grimly. "There might be a little brain damage, but better brain-damaged than dead, don't you think?"

"Not really!" Jack yelled after him as they were both shoved roughly to the floor.

The door slammed shut with a very final clunk, sealing them into total darkness. 

There was a loud thump that made Peggy jerk in reaction before she realized that Jack had kicked the door. This was followed by muffled, mush-mouthed cursing.

"If they haven't used the device on us yet, then they don't have it here," Peggy said. "They're going to have to go get it. And ..." She lowered her voice, in case they were being listened to, though she suspected the door was thick enough that they probably couldn't be overheard -- a very tiny silver lining to a very dark cloud. "That might take awhile, if Samberly has it and they aren't aware of that."

"So we're putting our lives in Samberly's hands now? Or not our lives so much as our brains, which is even worse."

"Really more in Daniel's," Peggy pointed out. "You said yourself that he'll find us." 

Jack made a hissing sound, and then there was silence for a little while, broken only by his harsh breathing.

It was almost dark -- but not completely. As Peggy's eyes adjusted, she began to make out a slightly lighter band on the ceiling. It didn't cast enough light to see by, just enough to relieve her eyes slightly when she let her gaze rest on that slightly-less-than-pitch-black bit of ceiling. Some kind of ventilation system, she guessed. After all, if this bunker was designed for people, they weren't going to want anyone to suffocate.

At least they didn't need to add "running out of air" to all their other current worries.

Peggy sighed and rolled over so that she could sit up against the wall. Her hands, ribs, and head all ached abominably, but she expected that it paled compared to how Jack must be feeling.

She could tell where he was by the sound of his breathing, which changed pitch occasionally, accompanied by small grunts when he moved and little clinks from his cuffs. He seemed to be exploring their prison.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Silence, then, from off in the dark: "For what?"

"For ... letting him do that. For getting you involved in the first place."

He gave a huffed laugh, then muttered, "Ow," and spat. " _You_ didn't get me involved. I was already involved. And I know how to take a beat-down, Carter."

"I never doubted it."

Another huffed almost-laugh. His voice came from a different angle now. "Don't suppose you remember what it was that you were investigating Wescott for."

"Afraid not," Peggy said. "However, I would say the evidence suggests that he is, in fact, actually doing it."

"Whatever it is."

"Correct."

Some more silence followed, during which small scuffling sounds let her know Jack was still looking for weak spots in their prison. Peggy didn't expect he'd find any, or else she would have been looking too. It was a bunker, and in the look she'd gotten before they were shoved in, she'd noticed a total lack of dead leaves, small animal nests, water stains, or other signs that it had been breached by weather or animals in the handful of years since the war's end. It was still sealed tight, in good shape, and empty. They weren't likely to find a way out, especially not with their current lack of tools. 

But it kept him busy. He probably had the right idea. She was becoming increasingly aware of how thirsty she was and how much her hands hurt.

She worked on the cuffs for a while. She had small wrists and hands compared to a man, so it seemed to her that someone used to handcuffing men might not tighten them enough. Her wrists were sticky with blood, which, though unpleasant, might be able to lubricate them enough to get them off. At least that was her theory. It didn't seem to be working.

With a muffled grunt, Jack sat down somewhere near her -- it sounded like he was just out of arm's reach. "How's it going over here?"

"I am attempting to escape my cuffs. I'll let you know of any progress on that front."

"You too, huh?"

More silence. She tipped her head back against the wall. There had to be _something_. It went against her nature to just sit here. But she was drawing a total blank.

"No crazy ideas?" Jack asked. "No last-minute, hairs-breadth escapes? No explosions?"

"Is that what I'm known for around here?" A few incidents during the war came to mind. But really, she'd hardly had a chance to blow anything up herself, not with Dernier and Dugan around.

"It's definitely something you're good at."

"Sorry to disappoint." She closed her eyes, not that there was a difference in the pitch dark. "Maybe whatever part of me used to do that was lost when Wescott wiped my memories."

She intended to be flippant, but the words turned out to be an edged blade, cutting as she spoke them. The thought hadn't occurred to her, until now, that she'd lost anything other than her memories. She'd been assuming that she had been reset to the same person she'd been two years ago.

But what if that wasn't true? What if she was missing other vital pieces of her personality that she didn't even know she'd lost?

What if she was neither future Peggy nor past Peggy, but a third person entirely? A much flatter, less intelligent, less resourceful person?

"Hey." Out of the dark, something bumped her foot. She jerked in surprise before realizing it was Jack's foot, tapping against hers. "No brooding. Sousa and I are supposed to be the sulkers in the household."

This startled a laugh out of her. "Daniel sulks?"

"And how."

"He'll find us," Peggy said softly.

"Sure he will."

They lapsed into silence again. 

There was, unfortunately, nothing else to do but think. And no matter how hard Peggy wanted to keep herself focused on Wescott, on making plans to get out, it was another topic that her thoughts kept circling back to, again and again, like migratory birds coming home to familiar shores.

"Jack," she said at last, and heard him stirring in the darkness. "What was it that ... changed, with us? What made the difference?" _What made me fall in love with you, the first time?_

There was a long silence, long enough that she nearly reached out with her foot to make sure that he was still there, still awake. Then he gave a short, bitter laugh. "Do you think I haven't been asking myself that? You think I haven't been wracking my brains, trying to figure out what happened, what I _did?_ I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I could."

"And?" she ventured, when he went silent again.

"And there's nothing. It's a god damned miracle, is what it is; it's a miracle that it ever happened with either one of you. It's on you, not me. I didn't do a damned thing."

"Surely there must have been something. Some noticeable shift in the way we all were with each other. You're ..." She hesitated to voice it, but she had to, because she'd known all along; it was only that she had forced herself to deny it. "You're different. You're not like you were."

"Like I was?"

"When I knew you. The way I remember you. You changed, Jack."

"People don't change," he said without hesitation. "Not really. _You_ didn't. Sousa ... is always Sousa, no matter what. And I'm --"

He didn't finish.

She waited, and then said, "Daniel said we came back from Russia different. What happened there? What _really_ happened?"

A short, hard laugh. "We spent a couple of days together in the field. I broke under fire, and you saved my life. I told you about the worst thing I ever did. And that's it."

"That doesn't answer anything."

"It doesn't for me either, and I was there."

Discomfort -- the pain in her hands and shoulders, her increasingly intrusive thirst, her worry about what was going on with Daniel and what was going to happen when Wescott came back -- frayed her temper to its breaking point. "Jack, I'm trying. Can't you try too? Don't you understand how hard this is --?"

She snapped the words off, a little too late; she hadn't meant to say them.

"Fucking cakewalk for me, then, right?"

It was startling to hear him swear so vulgarly at her. "I didn't mean that," she said. "It's only ... Jack ... I'm trying to work my way through this. It's like putting together the clues for a case when I'm missing half the pieces. Please, help me understand. Help me understand _us."_

Jack let out a long sigh. She heard his head clunk against the wall as he let it drop back, followed by a muttered "ow" that brought a trace of a rueful smile to her lips.

"I would if I could," he said. "It's not that I don't want to tell you, okay? It's just that I don't know what to say. I don't know the answers to your questions, Peggy. I'm not sure if there are answers. Even trying to find a way to talk about it, to put it into words, it just makes me more aware ..." He stopped and started again. "I guess I just worry -- that --"

She waited.

"That neither of you actually like me all that much," he said at last, the words dragged out of him. "The two of you together -- you're good together, Peggy. Daniel's had eyes for you since day one. Everyone's always been able to see that. Hell, sometimes it seems like the two of you were the last to notice it."

Had he? Had _she?_ Jack was right, she certainly hadn't noticed, though as obvious as Daniel's fondness was now, it made her look back on certain incidents a little differently. 

"And you?" she asked.

"Me? I'm the odd man out. You two, you could get married and have a good life. No more of the secrets and the sneaking around and the whole _mess_ of it. But I can't really see that with you and me, can you? And I don't think Sousa would marry me even if the whole idea weren't ridiculous. Why are the two of you wasting your time, when it would work so much better if I wasn't in the picture?"

In those early days after waking up, she'd wondered that exact thing. But now, the raw hurt in his voice tore something in her heart. _What does it take to break someone so badly, that that's how they think about themselves?_

Jack drew a shaky breath. "The point is, sooner or later I'm going to destroy this, because I'm me. And there's no way I can ever put it back together, because I don't know what made it happen in the first place, or what was ever holding it together. I just thought whatever ended us would be something _I_ did, not something like this."

She turned her face toward him. There was something about the sound of his voice ... she edged a little closer, and then she caught onto what the tiny hitches in his breathing meant.

He was crying, there in the dark, without making a sound.

"Jack," she said, shocked.

He pulled away quickly -- she hadn't realized she'd gotten so close; their shoulders had almost been brushing, and she realized it only by a draft of air and the scrabbling sound as he moved away.

She let out a breath and turned her face against the wall. The concrete was cool under her cheek.

"Jack?"

"Yeah?" he said after a minute, his voice under control again.

She hesitated. There were words waiting behind her teeth, and once she said them, she couldn't ever take them back.

She thought of the way he'd taken the beating today, enduring it in silence. There was a similar feeling in the way he seemed to be waiting to see what she'd say, and that was what made her speak at last.

"I think she -- me -- the other me, the one I used to be, the one I will be if I get my memories back ... I think she loved you very much. I think she still does."

"What ..." His voice cracked. "What makes you say that?"

"Because of how hard I've had to try not to," she said quietly. "Everything I remember about you is awful. But I can still feel myself _wanting_ to. I think ... I think, if I never get my memories back, it wouldn't be so impossible that it might happen again. If we both wanted it to."

Silence, in the dark. And then he said, in a voice that was shockingly fragile and young, "Do you?"

Easier, perhaps, to tell the truth when they couldn't see each other. "I'm not sure," she said, "but that doesn't mean no," and with that, she moved forward, edging herself along the wall until she bumped into him. She felt him lean away, and she touched her face to his shoulder, orienting herself in the dark so that she could find his mouth, very gently and tentatively, with her own.

His lips were bruised and swollen, salty from blood and tears. She kissed him softly, almost chastely; she was afraid of hurting him, and just as afraid of what she might awaken in herself. 

Even without being able to remember, she hadn't feared loving Daniel; she had trusted that he would catch her if she fell. Kissing Daniel had been like coming home. This was more like a long step into a dark room, not knowing what, if anything, would await her foot when it touched the floor. It was a desperately terrifying leap of faith.

She felt Jack shiver against her, felt his breath ghost across her lips as the soft kiss broke apart. Closing her eyes in the dark, she leaned against him, and after a moment of tension, he leaned back into her. She turned her face into his shoulder and felt his cheek rest against the top of her head.

Sometimes you took a leap of faith and there was nothing there at all, nothing but a long fall. She'd had it happen to her.

But sometimes the landing could be gentle, after all.

She didn't know how long they stayed like that. What roused her was a clunk and rattle at the door as someone unbolted it from the outside.

They jerked apart. Peggy scrambled to her feet. "Each side?" she whispered.

"Gotcha." Jack didn't have to ask for clarification. She heard a grunt of pained effort as he got to his feet -- as much as she'd stiffened up, sitting on the concrete floor, she didn't want to think about how sore he must be -- and scuffs and rattles let her know he was taking up position on the other side of the door. She flattened herself against the wall and clenched her hands into fists, trying not to focus on the pain of her abraded wrists. They had no weapons, but she could throw her hands over someone's neck and choke them with the cuffs. If she remembered correctly which way the door was hinged, Jack would be behind the door when it opened, which meant in those critical early seconds, it was up to her.

The door swung open and light, agonizingly bright after the hours of darkness, flooded their prison. Peggy squinted through watering eyes and was able to catch the familiar glint of crutch metal just in time to check her swing. She bumped her shoulder hard on the wall instead.

"Peggy," Daniel said, with a world of relief in his tone. He started to reach for her and aborted the movement in a gesture that was becoming painfully familiar. Peggy reached out instead and took his hand. Daniel holstered his gun to clasp both her hands in his. 

"Peggy. God. Let me get this off you -- Is Jack here?"

"Jack's here," Jack said, limping out from behind the door. Now that Peggy had light to see him by, he looked even worse than she'd expected; his face was battered, hair matted with dried blood, and he was hunched over despite his obvious efforts to stand up straight.

"Holy crap," Daniel said. His face darkened and his jaw clenched as he unlocked Peggy's cuffs and gently peeled them off her scraped, bleeding wrists. "I was too gentle on that bastard. Someone should go in there and lay a few more on him."

"Dr. Wescott?" Peggy asked hopefully. "You got him?"

"I did. We did." He turned to undo Jack's cuffs, then crouched awkwardly to unlock their feet, while Peggy took the cuffs off Jack's wrists -- which weren't in any better shape than her own; he'd been fighting his cuffs, too. She dropped the blood-crusted metal to the floor with a shudder.

While Daniel uncuffed Jack's feet, Peggy ventured out of the bunker, using a hand on the side of the entryway for support as she found herself unaccountably dizzy. She hadn't realized the light flooding through the doorway was electric light, not sunlight. Darkness had fallen while they were inside, but the facility was brightly lit with floodlights. The open space between the bunker and the warehouse had filled up with SSR cars and agents. Whatever fighting had occurred was now over, and several men were down on the ground, cuffed, while the rest -- Daniel's men, she assumed -- had spread out to secure the area.

Jack and Daniel came out of the bunker arguing. "The only place either of you are going," Daniel was saying irritably, "is the hospital." 

Peggy turned back, annoyed. "I'm not unwell. There's no need to make a fuss."

"Peggy," Daniel said in a strange tone, "your face is covered with blood."

"Oh." She raised a hand to touch her crusted forehead. The abrasions on her face did seem to have bled a bit. Her head hurt, but she was used to that by now.

"Right," Daniel said briskly. "Hospital it is. Into the car, both of you. Garcia, you'll handle the mop-up here?"

"Yes, sir," the agent said, as Daniel herded his charges into the nearest SSR car. Peggy thought about putting up a protest but found that she was just too tired. Anyway, she had to admit there was little for her to do here. There were more than enough people on the scene. Jack half-climbed, half-collapsed into the backseat next to her, and Daniel got into the front.

They jolted through a wide-open gate in a fence topped with barbed wire and drove out of the floodlit area into darkness, although the lights of L.A. were spread out below; they seemed to be up in the mountains somewhere. Daniel didn't drive far, just around enough bends to give them some privacy, before he pulled off the road at a wide place and twisted around to look into the backseat. "How are you two, really?"

"We're all right," Peggy said. "I think." Beside her, Jack stirred and lifted his head wearily off the seat back.

"Nobody's bleeding out back here, Sousa." He reached out to clasp the hand that Daniel extended between the seats.

"I'm serious about taking you two to the hospital."

"Right now," Jack said, on a sigh, "that actually sounds good." He let his head drop onto the seat back and closed his eyes.

Daniel reluctantly extricated his fingers to put the car in gear again.

"How did you find us?" Peggy asked as they jolted out onto the dark road.

Daniel's chuckle was grim. "Well, first of all, we got a frantic call from the Jarvises, who came home to find out that Stark's place had turned into a war zone while they were gone. Wescott was already a suspect, and we didn't even have to look hard to find him. We found him tearing up the lab in search of the memory device. Seems like he planned to use it on both of you."

"We know," Jack ground out, without opening his eyes.

"What he didn't know is that Samberly's got the memory doohickey, so we caught Wescott red-handed and dragged him out of the lab, straight down to a holding cell. Turns out," Daniel added, his voice colder than Peggy could remember hearing it, "he was happy to cooperate with the SSR in any way possible."

"Didn't know you had it in you, Sousa," Jack said.

"Yeah you did," Daniel shot back.

"But what did he _want?"_ Peggy asked. "Jack said the men with him were from the Washington office."

"Yeah, they are. Wescott transferred out from Washington too, about six months ago. He's one of the replacements that came in while we were so short-staffed after the cleanup last fall."

"The what?" Peggy asked.

Daniel cursed softly under his breath. "Sorry. When everything went down with Vernon Masters last year -- we told you about that, right? Turned out Masters at the War Department was in bed with a group of business interests and was trying to turn the SSR into his private enforcer wing. Once we started getting rid of Vernon's guys, we ended up losing almost half the agents from my department, and a third of Jack's. We all figured the Washington bureau was corrupt too, probably worse than either of ours, but it wasn't as easy to figure out who to trust because neither of us knew those guys at all."

"After a certain point," Jack said, without raising his head, "you have to just go ahead and get the job done, and trust that if a certain number of your guys are spying on you for factions in D.C., or, hell, for the Communists or who knows, then it's just a hazard of being in the spy biz."

"So we've all been behaving as if the SSR is full of moles," Peggy said slowly, "and no one mentioned this to me?"

"Well, when you put it that way ..." Jack grumbled.

"It's not like that," Daniel said. "Not exactly. We always knew there was a possibility that some of our replacement agents were crooked. We just didn't know ..." He trailed off and then punched the dashboard, hard, making Peggy jump. 

"In the words of the wise Daniel Sousa," Jack said, " _very_ mature."

"Shut up, Jack. I should have known. _You_ knew, Peggy, or suspected, at least."

"But I didn't share my suspicions with either of you." Which made more sense now that she was coming to understand the other Peggy's motivations a little better. If she had believed she was in danger, she wouldn't have wanted Daniel and Jack in danger along with her, at least not until she was sure of what she must have begun to suspect.

"That's our Peggy," Jack murmured. "Plays her cards close to the vest."

Peggy caught Daniel's quick glance in the rear-view mirror.

"They've been doing surveillance on me for a while," she said. "I can't be sure of the timeline, but I expect it's probably connected to this SHIELD project you told me about. Daniel, I never had a chance to tell you, but it seems that before I lost my memory, I had been keeping notes on it."

"Of course," Daniel said slowly. "That makes all the sense in the world. Whatever rogue elements in Washington were left over after the Arena Club fell apart are still keeping an eye on us, and they could tell you were up to something, they just didn't know what. And heck, they were right to be worried, since what you were thinking about was nothing less than taking the people you trusted from the SSR and setting up your own agency."

"If she doesn't get her memory back, it's dead in the water, isn't it?" Jack asked. "They might've managed to kill it even without knowing exactly what they were doing."

Peggy shook her head, and regretted it when the movement sloshed her sore brains around. "No, I don't think that's the case. I still have all of my notes. And now that I've experienced firsthand what the SSR is like these days, I can see why it was a priority for my other self to do something about it."

So much for walking away. But she'd known all along, on some level, that she couldn't. A fresh start sounded pleasant in theory, but what it came down to was abandoning people who relied on her, people who trusted her. And it just wasn't in her to do that -- _any_ version of her.

No, for better or worse, she was stuck with her other self's life, and all the fallout from her other self's decisions. Peggy supposed that if the last few days had proven anything, it was that she had no standing to criticize her future self's actions when her own decisions were just as likely to lead her into disaster.

And maybe her other self's decisions weren't as terrible as she'd thought, after all. She looked over at Jack beside her, eyes closed and bruised face peaceful, to all intents and purposes appearing to be asleep. When she touched his hand gently, he twitched. Peggy didn't take his hand, merely curled hers against it, so their knuckles were touching, and rode that way all the way into L.A.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the memory device puts in another appearance.

Daniel made sure Jack and Peggy were installed in the hospital before he was willing to leave and go back to the SSR. They both looked terrible, and he had no confidence that either of them was willing to stay there and not slip out as soon as his back was turned.

But it wasn't like he could ride herd on them all night; there were things to do elsewhere. He envied them in a way, because they could take a nice nap in a cozy hospital bed, and it was looking like another night of no sleep for him. He was too keyed up to want to sleep yet anyway.

And of course the first person he encountered when he stopped by his office at the SSR was Samberly.

"Chief! I've been looking all over for you!"

"I was out," Daniel muttered, sorting through the messages the night shift had left on his desk. Surprisingly, nothing seemed to be on fire. Garcia had capably handled the cleanup at the bunker, and six D.C. agents were currently cooling their heels along with Wescott in lockup.

"I think I've got the mem-o-tron working in reverse," Samberly said, and Daniel looked up sharply from the sloppy scrawl on the notes.

"Why didn't you lead with that? Important information first, man."

"Thank you, Samberly. That's a real good day's work, Samberly --"

Daniel gritted his teeth, but in this case, he had to admit that Samberly was right. He must have been working nonstop on the project since Daniel gave it to him, and right now he looked as tired as Daniel felt. "Thank you," he said. "You've done a good job. Where is it?"

"Down in my car. I didn't want to leave it -- is it true that someone raided the lab? Were they looking for the mem-o-tron? Is Ma okay?"

"Your mother's fine," Daniel said, making a mental note to send a car out to the Samberly residence and make sure that was actually the case; if he hadn't been so tired and distracted, he would have thought of it sooner. No one in Wescott's group of conspirators had any reason to believe Samberly was involved, or at least they shouldn't, but it would still be better to make sure. "Peggy and Ja -- Chief Thompson are at the hospital right now. We had a little trouble tonight. Are you good to go now, if we head over there?"

"Ready, willing, and able!"

"Any one of the three would have sufficed," Daniel muttered, picking up the jacket which he'd just taken off. "I have an errand to run first. Meet you at the hospital."

He swung by the house to pick up clean clothes for both Peggy and Jack. At the hospital -- having managed to beat Samberly there anyway -- he found that neither of them was asleep, and in fact Peggy was in Jack's room, or possibly vice versa, both of them sitting on the edge of the bed and playing cards with a deck they must have bummed off one of the staff.

As Daniel stopped in the doorway, Jack said something that made Peggy laugh, and Daniel was unprepared for the overwhelming surge of warmth that swamped him, leaving him leaning against the doorframe to avoid tilting right over. They were _getting along_ ; they weren't fighting, weren't being cruel to each other. Even if Samberly's gizmo didn't work, maybe things weren't too broken to fix, after all.

The love he felt for both of them in that instant was so intense he couldn't breathe.

"Don't look now, but we're being watched," Jack told Peggy in a stage whisper.

Peggy looked up and smiled at Daniel, really smiled at him, and his heart flipped over again. Still ... there was business to do. He peeled himself away from the doorframe and dropped the small suitcase he'd packed onto the end of the bed. "Thought you both might want something clean to change into. Peggy, I packed up some of your lipsticks and things, too. I wasn't sure what you'd want, so I brought a bunch of it."

Her beaming smile was the best thanks he could have asked for. "Daniel, you're wonderful. And _you_ are too slow," she told Jack, as she scooped her things out of the suitcase. With an impish smile, she vanished down the hall to the ward's bathroom.

"Not all of us need to primp in the mirror, thanks!" Jack called after her.

Daniel shut the door and watched Jack get a clean shirt out of the suitcase, moving slowly and carefully. Jack looked somewhat better with the blood washed away, bandages on his wrists, and the cuts on his face taped. But his face was still badly bruised, and Daniel's breath hissed out in sympathy when Jack unbuttoned his shirt -- splattered with dried blood down the front -- and the bandages taping over his ribs came into view, along with the large bruises peeking out from underneath. Some of them were boot-shaped. Daniel wanted to punch someone.

"Cracked or broken?" he asked noncommittally, as he got tired of watching Jack struggle with the shirt and came over to help.

Jack gave him a wry look and succumbed to Daniel's gentle efforts to peel the shirt off his arms. "Two broken, three cracked. I'm supposed to avoid 'activity and stress'." The air quotes were audible.

"After what it was like keeping you in bed when you'd been _shot in the chest,_ I'm sure that's going to happen. Hold your arm out."

Jack winced as he put up his arm, and Daniel carefully tugged the clean shirt over his bandaged wrists. "Sousa, you're dating a woman who went to a party with a rebar hole through her abdomen. Which, by the way, I still can't believe I had to find out about from Jarvis, of all people."

"We were going to tell you." Daniel glanced reflexively toward the door -- it was night on the ward, so he didn't think anyone would be about, but it was habit -- before wrapping his arms around Jack's neck to button the shirt, and pressing a kiss to a relatively-less-bruised part of his cheek while he was at it. "And _we're_ dating her, so stop pretending I'm the only one whose judgment is compromised."

Jack leaned against him, and Daniel sighed and closed his eyes and sagged onto him for an indulgent moment -- gently, though. He pressed his face into Jack's neck. "There were a few hours there," he murmured, lips moving against Jack's skin, "when I didn't know -- There was broken glass all over the place at Stark's, and you two were _gone,_ and ..." He had to take a few deep breaths to get himself under control.

"Hey." Jack raised a hand to comb his fingers through Daniel's hair. "We were okay. Nine lives and all that."

"You're both at least on your fourth or fifth life by now. I think I've run through a few of mine just from keeping up with you."

The doorknob turned, and Daniel jerked back, even knowing it was probably Peggy -- and was glad he'd let go when Samberly entered instead, lugging a case. Fortunately Samberly was too engrossed in his own business to notice the two of them hastily reasserting their personal space. "Chief. Chiefs. Where's Carter? They said she was here."

"Bathroom," Daniel said, leaving Jack quietly buttoning his sleeves and adjusting his collar into place. "You've got the thing there?"

Samberly laid the case on the bed and snapped it open. The memory device was still an incomprehensible mess of wires, but Daniel was fairly sure there were more wires on it than there had been the last time he'd seen it.

"Who is this?" Peggy asked from the doorway.

Daniel was genuinely baffled for just long enough that Jack beat him to the punch. "That's Dr. Samberly," Jack said, his attention on his cuffs and trying to get them just so over the bandages on his wrists. "He's the one who's been working on the memory thing for you."

... right. She hadn't met Samberly yet. Or at least she didn't remember that she had. Every time he thought he was getting used to the situation, some new aspect of it caught him off guard, like bringing his foot down on an expected stair-step that turned out to be missing.

"Oh," Peggy said softly.

She looked much better in a clean dress with her makeup on: not so much because of the makeup as because of the psychological spring in her step that it gave her. She had her armor, like everyone did. Daniel had known that giving her a chance to get cleaned up and get her face on would make her feel better. She still looked drawn and tired, but not so much like she was teetering on the edge of cracking.

Even so, the urge to take her in his arms was so hard to resist that he had to clench his fists to hold himself in place, especially as she approached the open case on the bed as if she thought it might bite her. Samberly, oblivious to her distress, whipped the device in front of her, making her jerk back.

"For God's sake, man!" Daniel snapped. He tensed to stop Samberly if he tried to put the thing on her right here and now.

"It's fine, Daniel. I'm fine." Peggy drew a deep breath, with a slight hitch in it, and held out her hands. "May I?"

Daniel noticed Jack going tense, too. Even Samberly hesitated. "For what I'm going to do, this should probably have an experienced operator. I haven't tested it yet --"

"I'm not going to _use_ it, I'm only going to look at it," Peggy said with a hint of the peremptory bite in her voice that Daniel realized he'd very rarely heard since she woke up missing two years of memories. Her confidence had taken a hard blow. It was nice to hear her ordering people around again, and it worked on Samberly, who meekly put the tangle of wires, tubes, and little cups in her hands.

Daniel wondered if he was the only one who could see that her hands were shaking very slightly. She was absolutely terrified of the thing. He looked away, lest he give in to the urge to put a comforting hand on her arm. Even the two-years-along Peggy wouldn't appreciate a gesture like that.

"Did you say you haven't tested it?" Jack said, with a hint of menace in his tone.

"Who would I have tested it on?" Samberly retorted. "The cat's back at Ma's, Stark's butler wouldn't hold still long enough, and I can't exactly test it on me --"

"But you're perfectly willing to test it on her," Daniel snapped.

Peggy looked up from her examination of the device. "It's all right, both of you. It's my memories that need to be restored."

"You need a test subject?" Daniel said. "You can test it on --"

"Me," Jack said over the top of him.

Daniel shot him a scowl. "I was trying to --"

"I know what you were trying to do, Sousa." With a pained expression, Jack heaved himself off the bed. "But that won't tell you anything. You need someone whose memories were already wiped out by the thing, right? And the only other person in this room who had that done to them is me."

"You did?" Peggy said, giving him a surprised look.

"You wouldn't remember, and it wasn't a lot of memories. But if I get them back ..." He shrugged, then winced at the tug on his injured ribs. "We'll know it works."

"Yeah, and if it _doesn't_ work and wipes out what few working brain cells you have --" Daniel began hotly.

"Then it's better to do it to her?" Jack snapped back. "If you've got a better idea, I'm all ears! I only lost a few minutes, compared to _two years,_ so it's a perfect test case. If it's going to damage anything, it shouldn't do as much as it would to her, right?"

"I don't think it works like that!"

"Actually, that's exactly how it works --" Samberly tried, but no one was listening to him.

"And even if it does work, you know what you'll get back, right?" Vernon's moment of betrayal. None of them knew exactly what had happened, since Jack himself didn't know, or at least claimed he didn't, but as far as personal worst moments, it had to be fairly high on the list.

"Of course I do, Sousa, I'm not an idiot, which you apparently think I am --"

"I don't want you to get yourself hurt!" Daniel burst out. " _Or_ her! Either of you -- listen, you already got the crap kicked out of you, and so did she, so at least let me take this hit. Okay?"

There was a brief silence. Jack looked away.

"It won't work, Chief Sousa," Samberly said into the lull in the conversation. "He's right. If there's no existing damage to undo, which in your case there won't be, we'll learn nothing. Chief Thompson, I think you're the only person who can do this -- well, except Jerry, who was our original test case, but he transferred out to D.C. a few months ago."

"Then erase my memory and put it back," Daniel said. The end of the sentence was lost under a chorus of "No!" from both Peggy and Jack. Ignoring them, Daniel stared at Samberly. "That's an order. From your boss."

"He may be your boss, but he doesn't outrank me," Jack said. "Doc, if you do that, you're gettin' punched. Fair warning."

Samberly flinched. "I couldn't even if I wanted to, Chief. The mem-o-tron has been completely rewired. It won't erase memories at all anymore. What it does now is look for connections in the brain that show the characteristic disruption pattern and relink them. At least ... that's what it does in theory, obviously I won't know until we do a field test --"

"So test it," Jack said. "On me. I think we're all agreed that that's the best option, right?"

"I can't let you take that risk for me, Jack," Peggy said quietly.

His gaze flicked to her, quick and soft, and Daniel thought it was a good thing that Samberly had the emotional sensitivity of a brick, because anyone with a slightly more nuanced acquaintance with human emotions couldn't possibly miss that look: the look of a man in love. "I hate having my head messed with, Carter. This is just putting things back how they should have been all along, before Vernon zapped my brains. So, Doc? What's it gonna be?"

"Uh." Samberly looked at Daniel.

"It makes sense to test it on someone other than Peggy first." The words were dragged out of Daniel as if by fishhooks. "I'd like it to be me. Samberly, you're absolutely sure it can't be me?"

"It can't," Samberly said, his voice definite. "Sorry, Chief. It just wouldn't work. For what it's worth, I think Chief Thompson is right that he'd make a good test case. His exposure to the device was short and it was a long time ago. If this works, then it's very likely to work on Agent Carter, and if it doesn't, the odds of anything going wrong are less."

"How _much_ less?" Daniel wanted to know.

"Does it matter?" Jack sounded both frustrated and amused. "It's not going to change anything, right?"

"It does if we're talking 90% versus 89% or something like that."

"Oh, no, no." Samberly had reclaimed the device from Peggy and was fiddling with its settings as he spoke. "Not like that at all. I can't give you a percentage, I mean, we're talking about something I've never used for this purpose before, so the best I could do is pull a number out of my ... shoe," he hastily inserted, with a look at Peggy. "But nothing _that_ high. I really think this will work. It's just a matter of establishing proof of concept." He powered it up -- there was a whine and a hint of ozone in the air -- and held it out toward Jack, with one of the device's glowing leads in each hand and the slightly-larger-than-before mass of it supported between them. "You ought to sit down. This might be slightly disorienting."

Jack sat. Daniel hovered. Peggy was also hovering, but more discreetly. Jack had closed his eyes, but now he opened them and glared up at the onlookers. "Think you two could back off a little?"

Daniel wanted to take his hand. Wanted it so badly that it was almost physically painful. But then Peggy did it, took two steps closer and slipped her fingers into Jack's, and Jack seized her hand so hard that Daniel saw her brief grimace before her face smoothed out again.

Samberly was only paying attention to the device. "Okay, it's fully powered up. Here we go."

He touched the device to Jack's temples. 

Daniel had never seen it in action before. He hadn't expected it to do anything visible, let alone for it to be as alarming as it actually was: Jack tensed, stiffened, and his eyelids fluttered and eyes rolled up briefly. Now that it was much too late, Daniel wished someone had had the good sense to send Peggy out of the room.

"Dr. Samberly, is it supposed to be doing that?" Peggy demanded. Her teeth were clenched; Jack's fingers had locked onto her hand so hard that the flesh turned white. 

"I ... think so ..." Samberly pulled away; the glow on the device went out. Jack's abnormal tension lasted an instant longer, and then he wilted as if every bone in his body had turned to jelly.

Peggy, startled but fast on the uptake, caught him. Daniel moved forward to help her lay him out on the bed, thinking, _We should have done this on me, should have found a way, why do we never come up with any ideas that aren't terrible --_

"Dr. Samberly!" Peggy said.

"It put you in a coma for three days after Wescott's modifications," Samberly pointed out. He was tinkering with the device again; setting it down by Jack's feet, he took a voltmeter out of the case and began checking connections. "If he doesn't wake up in a few hours, I'd be worried ..."

"A few _hours?"_ Daniel said, but Jack groaned just then and his eyes fluttered open.

"Jack?" Peggy said, touching his face. Daniel had ended up with his hand cupped under the back of Jack's skull, lowering his head to the bed, and he decided to leave it there.

Jack's stare was completely unfocused at first, but as they repeatedly called his name and Peggy patted his cheek, he slowly seemed to become aware of their presence. The first thing he said was, "Ow." After another moment, he mumbled, slurring slightly, "If it hurt that much the first time, I'm glad I forgot."

"Jack," Daniel said anxiously, "what year is it?"

"1948. Calm down."

"Who is President?" Peggy asked, and then stopped herself: "Actually, I'm not entirely sure myself. Is it still Truman?"

"Still Truman," Jack groaned. "I haven't forgotten anything. At least I don't think so."

"And ..." Peggy began. 

She paused, met Daniel's eyes, and Daniel was the one who asked, "Do you remember, uh, anything that you didn't before?"

"If you mean do I remember Vernon zapping me, yes I do. It works. And God, my head hurts. Someone turn the lights down."

Peggy turned on the bedside lamp and went to turn off the brighter overhead light, provoking a "Hey!" from Samberly.

"Are you done there or aren't you?" Daniel asked. He still had his hand cupped under the back of Jack's head, and Jack had brought up a hand to loosely circle his wrist. "Is she going to get a headache too? Can't you do anything about that?"

"It's a miracle that it works at all, Chief. I barely understand the science myself --"

"What do you mean, it's a miracle? You just said you were confident it was going to work!"

"Confident," Samberly said, "in a general sense, maybe not so much in the specifics. Do you realize it worked exactly within specifications on the very first try? Do you know how rare that is?"

"How rare, exactly?" Daniel asked in a dangerous tone.

"Can we have less arguing in here?" Jack complained pathetically, giving his wrist a quick squeeze.

Peggy was standing beside the bed, looking down at him. One of her hands had come to rest on Daniel's shoulder. "Dr. Samberly, could he be in danger of suffering from an aneurysm or something of that nature?"

"Nah, aneurysms don't hurt, usually," Samberly said without looking up from the device. "You'd just drop dead."

 _"Not_ comforting," Jack said, eyes closed.

"We're not proceeding with Peggy until we've checked Jack out thoroughly," Daniel declared. "There's no hurry, Peggy, your brain isn't going anywhere, and the last thing we need is two of you having a medical emergency at the same time."

"I'm not having a medical emergency."

"Shut up, Jack, unless you have a medical degree you haven't told me about."

 

***

 

Peggy found herself fading into the background while the cadre of SSR-affiliated doctors that Daniel had managed to rustle up (most of them familiar to her from her own recent hospitalization, and all of them looking sleepy and slightly disgruntled) fussed over Jack, shone lights in his eyes, and herded him into various machines to bombard him with X-rays and whatever else they had in mind.

She wondered if Daniel had any idea how closely he was hovering. Eventually she decided to rescue Daniel, or rather, to rescue an increasingly irritable-looking Jack _from_ Daniel, not to mention getting him out of the way of the doctors. So she gently but firmly herded Daniel off to the staff canteen to feed him coffee.

She didn't realize until they were already in the canteen that she'd known exactly where to find it. "Have we spent time in this hospital before?"

"When Jack was shot." Daniel accepted the cup that she pushed into his hands, and sank into a chair. "We basically lived here."

"That's right, I remember you saying something about that." 

There was a hot-water decanter beside the coffeepot, along with a box of cheap teabags. It wasn't until Peggy had finished steeping her tea and took a deep whiff of the steam that memory stung her like a bee in the recesses of her brain. She _remembered_ that chalky smell of badly-cut tea ends, remembered the mildly metallic taste of the water here. 

Daniel stirred out of a half-doze and looked up at her. "Did you remember something?"

"I did." She seated herself beside him.

He sat up quickly. "Peggy, that's incredible! What did you remember?"

"Just snatches, from the time we were here before, I suppose. It's not the first time it's happened. I keep getting little glimpses of ..." _That other life,_ she almost said. But it wasn't another life, not really. It was _her_ life.

Perhaps it was time to be getting back to it.

She no longer felt the same all-consuming panic at the idea of another Peggy moving into her head, erasing all traces of her. What she felt now was more of a gentle wistfulness. If the procedure worked, these next couple of hours were the last time that she would ever be the person she was now. 

Except she'd stopped being that person a long time ago, which was a truth she'd spent the last few days trying not to acknowledge. And she would still carry that person inside her, along with all the new memories she'd made here.

She wondered how different these memories would feel to her later, once the rest of her slotted back into place. Strange to imagine being a different person in just a few hours.

Different ... but not really so different, after all.

"Peggy?" Daniel asked softly. "Do you feel all right?"

"I do." She smiled at him. "You know, I was thinking about something."

"What's that?"

"We never really got to finish our kiss, back at your house. I'd like to kiss you properly, just once."

His smile was sad. "We've already kissed properly any number of times."

"Yes, but ..." _But I haven't,_ she almost said, but she didn't think he'd understand. Jack seemed to come closer to getting this part of it than Daniel did, perhaps because he'd had to reinvent himself too, in ways she was only beginning to understand. 

Even if he didn't understand, though, Daniel's acceptance was something she could feel in her very bones -- he didn't have to understand what she was going through to love her just as she was. The warm way he was looking at her now was exactly how he probably looked at the other Peggy ... the lucky girl. Did she know how lucky she was? Well, when she got the rest of herself back, Peggy intended to make sure that she never forgot that part.

"I don't remember doing it," she explained.

And that made him smile in a way that wasn't sad at all. He touched her chin gently, drawing her lips to his.

She had been right: kissing Daniel was an experience well worth adding to the store of memories that were just hers, and hers alone, in the small time remaining to her before the other Peggy came back to claim what was properly and rightfully her own.

"You look sad," Daniel murmured, touching her lips with a gentle fingertip. "Does kissing me make you sad?"

 _No, only wishing I could have it all._ That she could hold onto this moment, and the kiss with Jack in the bunker, and all the other moments of tenderness and unexpected grace bestowed on her in the last few days -- that she could have all of this, everything the other Peggy had, and still keep herself as well.

But she knew, now, that she had no right to claim a life that the other Peggy had built one hard-won piece at a time, especially when she hardly knew how to value that life, not the way that the Peggy of 1948 would value it.

She wasn't whole, even if it didn't feel that way to her now. If she'd had no choice, she would have made it work anyway, she now knew; she would have built a home in which the foundation was missing a few pieces.

But in a few hours, she knew she would be very glad she hadn't had to.

"I'm not sad," she said. "Just hoping I remember all of this when I'm back to being ... me."

"You shouldn't forget it." Daniel touched her hand hesitantly, and she accepted it, lacing her fingers through his and letting him rub a soothing thumb across the back of her hand. "Not that I like putting my faith in Samberly, but from what he's said, that thing can't erase memories anymore. And Jack didn't seem to lose anything. You'll still remember everything that happened the last few days."

That hadn't been what she meant; she knew she'd remember the events, but she wondered if the emotions would still have meaning to her. She wondered if a Peggy who was older and more jaded, who had been sharing a bed with both of these men for the better part of a year, would still remember how much it meant to have a few kisses that were hers and hers alone.

And then she smiled and let it go. It would be what it would be. She didn't think future-Peggy would be unhappy with the choice she'd made, and that was the important thing.

She found herself wanting to say something to Daniel, as foolish as it was. To say goodbye, perhaps -- except there was no point: she wasn't going anywhere. She couldn't tell him she loved him, though she knew he would have liked to hear it, because she didn't love him yet, not really -- even though she could feel herself falling easily back into the well-worn tracks of that other Peggy's love for him, and knew that in time, if her memories never came back, she would have loved him.

Loved both of them.

"Thank you," she said instead.

He looked pleased as well as puzzled. "What for?"

"For being there for me," she told him. "For doing your best in what must have been a terribly difficult situation. For putting my happiness before your own, and making me feel that this life I don't remember is a good place to live in."

There was a throat-clearing noise from the doorway.

"Not to interrupt," Samberly said, "but they've just cleared Chief Thompson, which means ..." He rattled the memory device meaningfully.

"Samberly," Daniel said between his teeth, "could you ever so kindly give us a moment, please?"

Peggy shook her head. Smiling, she got up, and gave Daniel's hand a gentle tug, drawing him to his feet along with her. "We don't need any more moments now," she said. "We will have plenty of them in the future."

A whole lifetime of them, she hoped.

 

***

 

They had her lie down on a hospital bed, which, after having seen what had happened to Jack, she felt was probably a good idea.

Daniel shooed out the doctors, and so it was just her, Daniel, Jack sitting on the bed next to hers, and -- by necessity -- Samberly.

Who was still trying to offer instructions and advice.

"Based on how Chief Thompson reacted to the restoration of just a few minutes' worth of memories, you're going to be out for awhile. Maybe a long while. And you might wake up with a headache."

"It's all right," she murmured. "I've had one for most of the last few days anyway."

"If it helps at all, mine's mostly gone away," Jack said, and Peggy turned her head to see him smiling at her supportively. "Or at least I hardly notice it with everything else that hurts right now."

Peggy took a breath and reached out a hand. Startled, Jack took a moment to place his hand in hers; then his fingers tightened. It was surprising how familiar that strong grip already felt. Comforting. Safe.

Daniel was already holding her other one.

Samberly, who had been making last-minute adjustments to the mem-o-tron, looked up. He frowned. His gaze lingered on Peggy's hand linked with Jack's. "Uh, Chief Thompson, you _do_ know I just saw her in the canteen with --"

"Samberly," Daniel said.

"Right," Samberly murmured.

The leads of the mem-o-tron were unexpectedly cold on her temples. Peggy felt a last desperate urge to say something, anything, but she swallowed it down. No need to go out while spouting embarrassing confessions. Instead she closed her eyes, and focused on the two warm hands holding hers.

_Whatever else you've done with yourself, future me, you made some good decisions along the way._

She was fairly sure that she was smiling when the pain came and washed her away to darkness.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is finally a sex scene, of sorts, and a conclusion.

It was deja vu: she woke up thirsty and dull-feeling and achy, and turned her head to find Jack Thompson sitting beside her bed.

Except he wasn't alone, this time. Daniel was stretched out on the bed next to him, chin propped in his hand. They were talking quietly, their voices a murmur that could not, for the moment, penetrate her haze of vague confusion.

The room was painted in stripes of soft late-afternoon sunshine through the blinds. Jack's bruises still looked fresh -- wait, he'd been hurt? Yes, he had been hurt. Taking a beating. For her.

Jack and Daniel were holding hands, she noticed after a moment: Daniel's hand was draped off the bed, Jack's fingers laced through his.

A rush of warmth flooded her chest, and she was content for a little while to merely lie there, watching them, letting her mind sort itself out.

Eventually a host of small discomforts worked their way to the forefront of her consciousness, making it difficult to properly enjoy a lie-in. She was thirsty, and bruised, and her wrists and head hurt, and there was a tickle at the back of her throat that at last became impossible to ignore.

Her soft cough drew their attention. Daniel sat up and Jack swiveled around to her bedside.

"Peggy?" they said, as one.

"I ..." She propped herself up on her elbows and coughed again. Jack jumped up and went to fetch a glass of water. By the time he came back, Daniel had swung down from the bed, into the vacated chair, and had hesitantly put his hand over hers.

"Peggy?" he asked softly.

"Give 'er a minute," Jack said, in the tones of one who had been through the same experience not too long ago. He held the glass to her lips. Peggy, with a surge of impatience, took it away from him; she didn't need to be spoon fed. His grin sent a shivering surge of warmth through her.

She drank and closed her eyes, and opened them again, to two anxious faces looking at her.

It was so _strange,_ the memories of the last few days settling into her head, rearranging as she reassessed them with the new information she had now. _Oh, Jack; oh, Daniel._ She had not been good to them. But she hadn't know any other way to be.

"I think ..." she began, and they both leaned forward, hanging on her words. "I think ... Did I call Mr. Jarvis _Edwin?"_

Jack burst into laughter, and Daniel's grin nearly split his face in half. "You remember," Daniel said softly. His eyes were warm and soft. "You _remember."_

She wobbled and fell forward, and both their arms caught her. "I remember," she whispered as both their heads rested against hers. "I do remember. I -- I'm --" She couldn't find the words, wasn't sure if she sought to apologize or to explain.

"Shhhh." Jack turned his face into her hair.

"How long?" she managed at last. "How long did I sleep—this time?"

"Not long," Daniel murmured, his hand (or someone's hand) rubbing up and down her back. "It's afternoon of the same day. It was just last night we got the two of you back."

She nodded. Somehow that seemed to matter to her, that she hadn't slept several days away this time.

"Docs are gonna have some tests for you." Jack pulled back, but he was still grinning at her.

"Of course they do," she sighed.

"I'll go let them know she's awake," Daniel said. "They wanted to know first thing."

Jack shook his head. "Nah, I'm on it. I'm already up." And he left, moving stiffly with a hand touching his side -- escaping the emotions in the room and the looming threat of heart-to-heart conversations as much as trying to be useful, Peggy suspected.

"Are you okay, Peg?" Daniel asked, taking her hand. His soft brown eyes searched her face. 

"I think so. I mean, I will be." _It's just so odd,_ she wanted to say, but she didn't know how to explain. It shouldn't have felt strange to come back to her normal life. Maybe it was only that she was still caught in between that other life and her current one, still trying to reconcile the things she remembered thinking and feeling with what she was thinking and feeling now.

Her two-years-younger self hadn't been wrong about the strangeness of having two conflicting sets of memories, though perhaps not quite in the way she'd thought. Mainly she felt sad for herself then, that unhappy, conflicted person. She hadn't really felt unhappy, and perhaps that was the worst part. She hadn't thought herself unhappy two years ago, either.

"Are _you_ all right?" she asked Daniel.

"Me? Why wouldn't I be?" He looked genuinely baffled.

"Oh, I can't imagine why not. You've only had a week of having to worry about me, manage Jack's temper, and try to stop us all from being killed by rogue SSR agents."

"All in a day's work around the Carter-Thompson-Sousa household." He touched the corner of her mouth lightly with his thumb; she felt the hesitation, and clasped her hand quickly over his, holding his hand there. Turning her head, she kissed his palm.

"Ah, Peggy," Daniel whispered, leaning his head against hers. "Does it sound strange to say that I've missed you?"

"Not strange at all," she murmured back, lips brushing his skin. "I've missed me, too."

 

***

 

After a flurry of tests, she was released, and so she found herself leaving the hospital in Jack and Daniel's company, for the second time. Evening shadows were drawing a blue curtain over the world, easing the day's heat. At this point her sleep schedule was destroyed, she thought with a rueful half-smile. It was going to take some effort to force herself back into her usual work routine. On the other hand, SSR work was round-the-clock even under the best circumstances, so this wouldn't be the first time she'd come off a series of long nights and naps, struggling to remember whether the sun was coming up or going down.

All she wanted to do right now was go home, anyway.

_Home,_ she thought, as she got into the backseat of Daniel's little green car. _I'm going home._

There hadn't been much to say after Jack had come back to her room with an entourage of doctors and SSR scientists. They were all three lost in their own thoughts, or maybe just too worn out from the last few days to really think about at all. She found herself trying to catalogue the way Daniel and Jack acted toward each other, and toward her, looking for differences from what she remembered. She tried to make herself stop. It didn't matter. If this had changed them, it was done; they would simply have to deal with it.

On her first trip home from the hospital a few days ago, her headache had felt like an ever-tightening vice around her skull. This time, it eased as they approached the familiar street with Daniel's house. The doctors would surely have an explanation, or at least would manage to come up with one, whether or not it was accurate -- damage from the memory device, anxiety, her brain fighting its own attempts to remember ... she didn't know, and doubted if she'd ever know. But by the time Daniel parked at the curb, all that remained was a faint vestige of an ache, more of a memory of pain than pain itself.

Jack led the way to the front door, unlocked it and nudged it open with his foot. He had a hand on his gun, drawing it as he stepped inside. Peggy glanced behind her at Daniel and saw that he'd drawn his, too, making her acutely aware that she'd never gotten hers back after being captured by Wescott.

"Is this necessary?"

"It's necessary, trust me," Daniel said softly, his hand on his own sidearm. "We think we got all of 'em, but we thought that the last time, too."

"Clear," Jack declared, appearing at the top of the stairs as he holstered his gun.

The house looked as if a whirlwind had hit it. Peggy had forgotten that her last act before being abducted was to pull out all the papers in her home office. Most of them were still upstairs, and _that_ would be a job to clean up, but she'd also spread out stacks of them on every downstairs surface. In addition to that, the house showed signs of a week of Daniel and Jack to all intents and purposes living at the hospital, running home for clean laundry but not otherwise bothering to do much in the way of picking up. Jackets were tossed carelessly over furniture backs, discarded shirts heaped in piles ... more than a few of her own things, too, as she'd never been a particularly meticulous housekeeper herself.

And it mattered not at all. Just to be here, to be _home,_ felt so good she could have cried.

"Peggy?" Daniel said, and she realized she'd stopped just inside the door.

"I think," she said, "I think ... I think I need a bath."

She closed the bathroom door on the house, the world, and the sources of all her messy emotions. Running the bathwater and stripping off her clothing gave her something to do, little everyday tasks to busy her hands while her mind calmed itself. She thought about pinning up her hair and then decided it could use a wash too.

The water stung her cuts and abrasions at first, especially her abused wrists, but after the pain faded, it felt good. She basked in hot water and began to relax, too, into the familiarity of everything around her. It was a source of such comfort to recognize it all, from the cracked place in the ceiling beside the light fixture, to each cosmetic item crowded on the back of the sink. She'd lived for the past few days in a world where she felt like a stranger, and she hadn't realized, until now, how much it had thrown her off to be constantly confronted with that sense of unfamiliarity at every turn. It was like the feeling of first landing in a new country, knowing no one, having to learn a new set of customs and rules. Except in this case the foreign country was her own life.

A life she hoped she would never take for granted again.

She pulled the plug in the bath and toweled herself off in front of the mirror. It appeared that she'd forgotten to bring clean clothing in with her. She gave a brief thought to putting back on her discarded blouse, then shuddered and nudged it away with her toe.

There was no need for that.

Hopefully Daniel had remembered to leave the front curtains shut. He was normally meticulous about it, but sometimes Jack would open them and have to be nagged about it.

She opened the bathroom door and peeked out. The curtains were closed, and she could hear Jack and Daniel's voices from the kitchen.

"Hello?" she called.

"Peggy?" Daniel called back. "Hope you don't mind sandwiches and some of Ana's leftovers. Nobody felt like cooking, but -- holy moly."

She'd just stepped into the kitchen doorway, naked, her wet hair straggling over her shoulders. Daniel was sitting at the table with the last bit of a sandwich now dangling forgotten in his hand. Jack, at the sink, turned around to see what the fuss was about. At the sight of Peggy, he raised an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth quirked up.

"Don't mind me." Peggy seated herself on Daniel's good knee and reached across the table. The sandwiches had been cut neatly into quarters; she selected one with a delicate pinch of her fingertips.

"Ouch," Jack murmured, and Peggy realized he was looking at her shoulder. She turned her head to look down at herself. Bruises were visible on her shoulders, on her ribs, and girdling both her wrist like bracelets.

"Job hazard," she pointed out.

Daniel put a hesitant arm around her and pulled her back against him. She leaned against him, and he kissed her ear. "You should see Jack's battle scars," he murmured into her ear as he nipped at it.

"I can already see them on his face."

"It gets better, believe me." Jack leaned against the sink with his hands curled around a cup of coffee. "C'mon, is this all the show I'm getting today?"

Most days, she would have responded with playful flirting in kind. Jack liked to watch her and Daniel together; she liked to watch them, too. But today, she only held out her bare arm. "Please," she said, her voice barely audible. "Please come here."

Jack came, leaving the cup on the edge of the sink and falling to his knees beside them. Peggy drew him in with an arm wrapped around his back, pulling his face into the crook of her bare shoulder. Daniel's arm was still curled around her, one hand cupping her breast -- she didn't think he'd done it intentionally, just that his hand had come to rest there.

She pressed into their warmth and held them close against her, one arm wrapped around Jack, the other reaching back for Daniel. Jack's lips were soft against her neck, Daniel's arms holding her in the gentlest of cages.

"Are you really comfortable like this?" she murmured, twisting her head around to ask Daniel the question.

"If you're planning on getting up, please don't." Which was not precisely an answer. She knew she was putting most of her weight on his legs.

"I was thinking about moving to the bedroom."

 

***

 

She remembered, in the way one remembers a dream, asking herself whether being Daniel and Jack's live-in girlfriend was the only poor, small thing she could dream of. And now, with two years' context she hadn't had before, she could answer that question: yes, she dreamed of it; yes, it was worth it. If she could not marry one of them, she would not marry either of them, because for all that she would love to wear a white dress and stand before her family and say _forever_ , she refused, absolutely refused to choose between them. Life said that she must, but she would not betray either of them in that way.

To do _that_ would be the poor and small thing.

At the moment, however, she had only one question.

"Where's my lamp?"

"Uh ... I broke it." Daniel sounded so sheepish that she had to laugh.

"I think I'm still finding pieces of it on the carpet," Jack remarked. "With my feet. Tread careful, Peggy."

She fell onto the bed, laughing. Jack looked down at her with a smile and sat on the edge. He started stripping off his shirt. Daniel, on the opposite side of the bed, was going through his usual routine, turning down his trousers and unstrapping the leg.

It was so familiar, so dear. She wrapped her arm around a pillow, pulling it under her head, and watched them both. Daniel smiled over his shoulder, watching her watch him as he peeled off his undershirt.

Jack, on the other hand ...

"Good Lord," Peggy said, sitting up when he stripped off his shirt with a grunt of effort and she got her first good look at what Wescott's men had done to him. His ribs were taped, and the rest of him was a mess of bruises and abrasions, particularly concentrated around his abdomen.

"It looks worse than it is," Jack said, although the fact that he was out of breath just from removing his shirt made this defense less than convincing.

Peggy leaned forward and traced a boot-shaped bruise over his hip with the lightest brush of her fingertips. Jack turned, with a soft grunt, and caught her hand gently. "Hey. Nothing you could'a done. I've had worse."

Daniel turned to give him an incredulous look. "If you mean the time you were shot in the chest, that's a low bar, you know that?"

Peggy kissed Jack lightly to the side of his bruised, swollen lips. It had been easier to kiss him in the dark, when she couldn't see the split places where his lips had been mashed against his teeth. He responded by catching her face gently in his hands and kissing her with more enthusiasm, which lasted until she leaned into him and he broke it off with a huff of pain.

"You know," he admitted with a grimace, his gaze dropping away from hers, "I'm not sure if I'm really gonna be up for much tonight."

"Really?" Peggy slid a hand down his front, dipping her fingers under the waistband of his boxers. "Because it feels like you're up for plenty. All you really need to do," she murmured, pushing him down onto the bed, "is lie down and let yourself be taken care of for a change."

Daniel's bare arms wrapped around her from behind, caressing her breasts. He was naked, his good leg curled under him, the other braced out to the side. "And how about you, Peggy?"

She pushed her backside against him as she bent over to pull Jack's boxer's down. "I think you can probably come up with some ideas, can't you?"

And there she was, some indeterminate time later, with her mouth wrapped around Jack, pressed between them with Daniel thrusting into her from behind. All the world was this -- the tug of Jack's finger's stroking through her hair, the press of Daniel's lips against her neck, the taste and the feel of them, the soul-deep intensity of loving and being loved. There had never been a need for words between them. They said "I love you" with every touch, "I forgive you" with every caress.

No matter what happened tomorrow, tonight she was home.

 

***

 

Peggy didn't remember falling asleep, but she twitched awake out of a dream that vanished as soon as her eyes opened, leaving her with nothing except a vague feeling of unease. The bedroom was dim but not dark; the door was half closed, the room illuminated by diffuse lamplight coming from the living room. Beside her, Daniel slept deeply, sprawled on the sex-rumpled bed with his face turned away from her. Jack was nowhere in sight.

She sat up carefully, retrieved a robe from the closet, and left the bedroom, closing the door softly to avoid waking Daniel.

Jack was in the living room, sprawled on the couch, half-dressed; he had trousers on, and an undershirt, but his feet and arms were bare. Under the lamp, with a drink in hand, he was idly glancing over one of the papers she'd pulled out of the home office. He looked up quickly at her approach, and she saw a brief spasm of pain cross his face when he moved too fast.

"Hi, Peggy."

"Hi." She ruffled his hair with one hand as she passed him and then padded into the kitchen, where she drank a glass of water. She brought the glass back to the living room (adding "dishes" to the mental list of things someone in the household was going to need to do, sooner rather than later). Jack looked up again as she poured herself a splash of whiskey out of the bottle. He didn't seem to be drinking hard tonight; the level in his glass hadn't gone down noticeably while she was in the kitchen. 

"Can't sleep?" she asked, sitting down in a padded chair across from him.

"Just need to quiet my brain down some." He shook the document he'd been reading at her. "This is the lease for an office in D.C. -- really? I didn't know you were to the lease-signing point on SHIELD yet."

"I haven't signed anything," she protested. "I'm data collecting. Howard's going to be providing most of the bankroll for the first year or two; hopefully by that point we'll have our feet under us and we'll be self-sufficient, but in the early days, our budget will be tight and we need to -- why are you looking at me like that?"

Jack was wearing a crooked half-smile, stretching his cracked lips. "You've definitely got your brain back."

"My brain was never gone. But ..." She took the sheet of paper from him and glanced at it before laying it on the coffee table. "You shouldn't have to learn how far along the project is from reading my files."

"It's your project. You don't ask me for all the details on how the New York office is running."

"Maybe I should," she said gently. "And maybe I shouldn't be making plans for a big move to D.C. without consulting either of you."

He looked uncomfortable. "This wasn't meant to be a complaint."

"It wasn't taken that way. But if the last few days have made me realize anything ..." She tucked her feet under her and swirled the whiskey in her glass, looking at it, not at him. "It's made me think about how much of my life I'm still living as if I was _that_ Peggy, the one from two years ago, the one who had neither allies nor friends. Or, at least ..." She looked up with a slight smile. "She thought she didn't. And I think there's some part of me that's never quite realized it's different now."

"You _can_ trust us," Jack said sincerely. "But that doesn't mean you have to tell us everything. I mean, I get why you wouldn't. Believe me."

"I know you do. But it's more than just a matter of trust. Or, I suppose I should say ..." She looked back down at the amber liquid in her glass, and took a slow sip, rolling it around in her mouth along with the words that were unexpectedly difficult to say. "That kind of trust, that kind of responsibility ... it's a knife that cuts both ways. I can't go about making plans for my life without consulting you and Daniel, as if I were a single woman. Because I'm not."

"You're not married," Jack said tightly. "There's no ring on your finger. Nobody's got a claim on you."

Before the last few days, and particularly before their conversation in the bunker, she didn't think she would have understood all the subtextual currents circulating around this conversation. Now she wondered why she hadn't seen it before: how afraid he really was, and how much of her own difficulty in explaining this relationship -- to herself, or to other people -- must have seemed, to the men in her life, like a refusal to commit.

"Jack," she said, her voice gentle, "don't you know I'd marry you and Daniel in a heartbeat if I could?"

He looked up, his eyes stormcloud-gray in the lamplight.

"And if I've been swanning about as if I hadn't a home to come back to, then I've been playing the fool, even to myself. I'll never stay home and keep house in pearls and heels, I know that, but I suppose that if either of you wanted me so, you'd find me a dreadful disappointment."

"Your cooking is terrible, it's true." His voice was light, but his eyes weren't; they were fixed on her as if she was at the center of the world.

"And why should I spend perfectly useful hours learning how, when we can live on omelets and takeout pizza? No ... if I've learned anything the last week, it's that I've made things vastly harder on myself than they have to be. I'd like to go to D.C., but I don't want to go alone. Let's get ourselves a house there, all three of us. No more flying back and forth from New York. No more of me keeping some of my things with the Jarvises and pretending I'm still living there."

"Peggy ..." Jack's hand twitched on the whiskey glass. "Nice as all of that would be, you know no one's going to give the time of day to you if they know you're an unwed woman living as the mistress of two men, don't you?"

"First of all, I don't need you to lecture me on the realities of my situation," she said, an edge slipping into her voice. "And second, I'm not planning to take out a full-page ad in the _New York Times,_ am I? All I'm saying is, I've tried doing this alone, and I'm done with that. SHIELD can't just be my project from here. It's ours. And it's going to involve moving to D.C., so --"

"So, at the risk of jumping to conclusions based on one small part of a conversation," Daniel's voice remarked sleepily from the bedroom door, "is she planning our entire lives for us, or does it just sound that way?" 

Looking sleepy and tousled, he was standing in the bedroom doorway in an undershirt and boxers, his leg off. One shoulder rested against the doorframe; his opposite hand gripped his crutch.

"Yes, that's pretty much what she's doing," Jack said, the corner of his mouth curling up.

"I am _not_ , I'm asking your opinion. Don't be impossible."

"It's all he knows how to be," Daniel said, limping over to lean on the back of Peggy's chair and kiss her hair. For a brief, disconcerting moment she could hear the teasing comment as her two-years-earlier self would have heard it -- all the dismissal, none of the playfulness and affection -- and then the momentary overlay of another Peggy was gone, and she looked up to meet Jack's eyes and share the fondness dancing there. She caught Daniel's hand, resting on the back of her chair, and pulled it down to kiss it.

"We're talking about D.C. and SHIELD," she explained.

"Yeah, I heard enough to figure that out." Daniel yawned and went around the chair to plunk himself down on the couch beside Jack. He reached for the papers on the coffee table, scattering them lightly with his fingertips. "So are we moving tonight or do we get a few days to put our affairs in order first?"

"I am not dragging everyone off to D.C.," Peggy protested. "At least not without a household consultation -- Jack, stop smirking."

"We get to consult now," Jack said to Daniel. "I suppose we should be glad she's upgraded us to consultants from whatever it was that we were before."

"Male harem?"

"Speak for yourself. I'm holding out for chief cook and bottle-washer myself."

"What I meant," Peggy said, with the sense that the conversation was somehow spinning out of her grasp, "was that it needs to be a mutual decision."

"We're just giving you a hard time, Peggy," Daniel said. "We're a team; you know that, right?"

"I know." She had to blink back the tears that suddenly threatened at the corners of her eyes. "I sometimes feel as if there are times when I have not been the best of team players."

Jack gave a sudden, snorting laugh. Daniel turned to elbow him, pulling it at the last minute and turning it into a gentle shove due to the state of Jack's ribs.

"The first step is admitting you have a problem, Marge."

Now Daniel was fighting not to laugh, too. 

"You're both incorrigible," Peggy muttered, but she was smiling behind her glass of whiskey.

And already she was thinking about a house in D.C. -- on a tree-shaded street somewhere, with three bedrooms, or maybe even four (one for all of them, and one for each of them to have their own office space). Or bedrooms for children, perhaps -- one with curly brown hair, one with blond ...

She was thinking about an agency where the terror of discovery was not quite so acute if they weren't beholden to the federal government for their paychecks, if they had Howard's money to hide behind. 

And she wished she could go back to herself from two years ago and say to that younger woman -- that grieving, determined version of herself -- that it would be all right, somehow; that she would come through all the trials, all the petty humiliations, all the terrible losses and somehow, in the end, everything would be all right. She would have a job that was worth doing, she would have triumphs to go with the defeats, she would have friends and a purpose and a future. 

She would have love, even if it took no shape she'd ever known to dream of.

She would have nights like this.

She wasn't sure if she could entirely say it had been worth it (all the deaths; Steve's death in particular) but what was done was done; it could not be undone. The world went on, and so did she.

And all she really needed to say to that younger self, that ghost at the back of her brain was: _Come what may tomorrow, I am happy tonight._


End file.
